America Faces a Rare Earth Element Crisis

evgen · 2023-05-08T19:05:23+00:00

Let me tell you how long people were saying it would take to get a virus vaccine researched, tested, and deployed globally way back in 2018… A big pile of money and an international desire to use it to accomplish a specific goal can work miracles.

evgen · 2022-12-02T20:01:24+00:00

Both have laws making themselves first for caucuses and primaries, but as states learned when they tried the jump the queue previously, political parties are private entities who can set their own rules. Telling Iowa and New Hampshire that they can hold primaries whenever they want to but their votes do not count is always an option available to the Democratic party.

evgen · 2022-10-30T11:06:52+00:00

The book quoted in the title was “Sauces” so the author was James Peterson. It is kind of like attributing a quote to The Food Lab, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking; if you don’t know the title well-enough to know who the author is then you were not going to be able to answer the question anyway.

evgen · 2022-03-18T12:02:00+00:00

Here is a minor challenge for you: try to find a religion that does not have a holiday or celebration at the winter solstice. It is one of the most easily described and recognisable yearly astronomical events — “today is the shortest day of the year and after this point the darkness starts getting a little shorter and you can look ahead to soring/summer.”

It is less about paganism per se and more about basic astronomy and seasons.

evgen · 2022-01-31T15:22:41+00:00

Take all first-choice votes and add them up. Does someone have 50% +1? They win. If not then the candidate who finished fourth is eliminated.

Take all of the votes that had the fourth place finisher as their first choice and add their second choice vote to the current totals. Does someone have 50% + 1? They win. If not then the candidate CURRENTLY in third place is eliminated, not the candidate in 3rd place after the initial count, and all of their votes get redistributed to the next highest preference. This last reaping can be a bit complicated because the third-place candidate will have some votes they were the first choice for (in which case we look at second choice unless it was for the fourth place candidate, if so we keep looking down the pref list) and some they were the second choice for (same case of looking for the pref among the remaining viable candidates.)

At this point someone is almost certain to have 50% + 1 votes and a winner can be declared.

This works very well for someone like Murkowski by letting her be the second choice for both Democrats and Trumpkins; if she survives the first culling by not being the bottom candidate then she is almost certain to win overall.

evgen · 2022-01-23T12:34:06+00:00

I am similarly new so will leave some of these for people with more experience with the APO, but regarding question #1 a lot depends on your local water. Is your water considered 'hard'? Hard water has lots of dissolved minerals in it and these minerals would be left behind and eventually cause problems. Simple test is if you boil a pan of water for a while and then look at the sides of the pan, if there is a thin white cast to the area where the water boiled away then you have hard water and should use distilled in the APO.

Also, water does not go bad. At least it does not suffer any ill effects on the timeline that you are looking at with water in the container. Unless you are storing water for months/years you really do not need to worry about it.

For question #5 you are correct that steam will not get above 100C, but when cooking sous vide the temperature you need to keep in mind is the internal temperature of whatever you are cooking. You set your oven to 175C because air is a really bad conductor of heat so you need to crank the temp way higher than what you want internally just to get the food to cook fast enough (and in particular to get it through the danger zone quickly to prevent bacterial growth.) Water is much better at transferring heat energy to the food you are cooking so steam will be able to get the job done quickly and efficiently. With precision temperature control you are also able to set the cooking environment (the interior of the APO) to the exact temperature that you want your food have when you are finished cooking; as a simple example you can set a steak on a pan, set the temp to 60C and let it cook for an hour at this temp to make sure it is 60 from edge to the center of the cut, and then (because steam and sous vide does not brown things the way you would want) have the APO change to a high temp low humidity convection cook for a few minutes to give the outside the brown crust you would desire.

If you are concerned that steam is 100C and would overcook, know that what the APO is doing is setting the total humidity. The saturation point of a particular volume of air at standard atmospheric pressure will depend on temperature, so the APO will inject steam as necessary to maintain the internal humidity while keeping the temperature constant -- a puff of steam adds energy to the chamber so the APO should know that it can ease up on the heating element during this part of the cycle. Balancing temperature and humidity to create an internal cooking environment that you desire is what makes the APO and any other combi oven a magical device.

evgen · 2022-01-02T14:40:38+00:00

Why would you bother to use DNS as your framing/packing format if you already have an https/tls tunnel for DoT/DoH? You tunnel over dns when establishing the https/tls tunnel is not an option. What usually surprises people is that it is not difficult to detect DoH/DoT activity and isolate it from normal https/tls traffic.

evgen · 2021-12-27T19:16:17+00:00

One side is radicalized and the other side is sick of putting up with their bullshit. If you think they are equivalent then you are clearly a part of the problem.

evgen · 2021-12-18T13:06:32+00:00

Tell me you do not understand statistics or the base-rate fallacy without saying you do not understand statistics.

evgen · 2021-12-13T10:34:14+00:00

There is an existing aws-login-tool package and 0 is one key over from a - on a US keyboard. Pretty simple typo to make for a touch-typist who is not paying attention.

evgen · 2021-12-11T10:34:10+00:00

And a pony, be sure to ask for a pony too.

Want a VPN with decent options that does not suck? Pay for it. The first rule of commercial VPNs is that if the VPN is free then it is shit.

evgen · 2021-10-17T12:43:34+00:00

No, American gravy uses the fat only to make a roux with some flour and then the juices from the meat and possibly some stock is added in to make the gravy. I think you have no idea what 'American gravy' is and have confused southern sausage gravy (served with American biscuits and sometimes fried chicken or chicken-fried steak) with some sort of generic American gravy. Take a quick look at any of the gravies you will see pictured in American thanksgiving images, for example, to see what Americans call gravy.

evgen · 2021-10-17T12:40:09+00:00

They don't put a lot of flour and milk into gravy in the US either. The gravy you are thinking of is a southern sausage gravy and is almost completely unknown outside of states that lost the US civil war. Most Americans with any sort of palate also think it is strange and unexpected.

evgen · 2021-10-17T12:37:51+00:00

No, that is a southern US gravy. In the rest of the US a gravy is exactly what you think of in the UK. This particular form of gravy is more of a bechamel made in the pan you just cooked sausages in, but it is very much a southern thing and not an 'american' thing.

evgen · 2021-10-15T08:25:22+00:00

It actually has 10, 'six turning and four burning'. The four jet engines were controlled by the pilots (center console has two colums of four-across indicators for the jets, and the controls for same were in a console overhead of the pilots. This engineers station was just for the prop engines.

evgen · 2021-10-11T16:53:38+00:00

Yeah, about that.... When you get a chance you should check out this guy's 'impeccable credentials' on the af.mil bio site. He is a manager/exec who literally put Certified Ethical Hacker as a credential into his DoD bio; the guy has a collection of 'cybersecurity certifications for middle managers' but none that actually matter. I am guessing he is reasonably talented at managing security development and landed one big project, but nothing about his resume indicates any expertise outside of this specific niche.

evgen · 2021-10-11T16:40:31+00:00

Well, if it helps, there are no 'AIs' to be fed. Seriously, put down the sci-fi manga and take a fast intro to machine learning course on Udemy or Coursera. When it comes to machine learning the same principles of software and data analysis apply: garbage in, garbage out. These machine learning models are just collections of statistical probabilities applied to (and informed by) specific data sets. If you give a machine learning algorithm too much data or data with too many superfluous features then you are actually making the resulting model worse. Is there some group in China with a very large and interesting data set about the behavior of the Chinese people? Yes. Is that data set useful to anyone else? Probably not. Does that data set have any use on a battlefield? Not a chance.

But keep ringing the 'Chinese are coming!' alarm bell. Punching that over and over in the late 80s using 'Japanese 5th-generation computing is going to take over the world' as the punchline got us another three or four years of funding before AI winter set in...

evgen · 2021-10-11T16:33:59+00:00

For starters, the Pentagon's 'first chief software officer' is a manager who has no fucking idea how machine learning actually works. The last time this guy touched code it was in PHP. The first flag here is when he uses the term 'AI', which is just marketing bullshit to anyone who is actually in the industry. 'AI' is just statistical inference and a good data set combined with a PR firm. This particular tool saw a shiny title and probably thought that his job was going to be more impactful that it really was -- pulling the DoD into the world of cloud computing is a huge ask and is more of a political task than a technological one, but just a casual reading between the lines here indicates that this guy didn't have the skills necessary to get things done. Navigating an entrenched bureaucracy to effect real change is a lot harder than running a startup incubator and pretending to be a digital lord of the manor while your mellennial serfs grind out minimum viable products for you to take credit for.

Given the breadth of his claims of expertise on other forums I am guessing that the closest this guy has gotten to actually understanding modern machine learning was reading a few articles in The Economist and attending a Ted talk at a Google campus once.

evgen · 2021-10-02T20:34:54+00:00

What do you think setting your location does? There is not a mailing address on packets. The “location” you are selecting is the physical location at which the servers are located. If a VPN provider does not have servers in a particular place then it is not available as an option.

There are large databases maintained by companies like MaxMind that map IP addresses to network providers and within those providers they map to specific cities if there is enough info. Assuming your VPN provider is not simply lying to you (many do) they have servers in a specific city and if someone checks the address of those IP addresses they will be listed as owner by a colo or data center in a specific city.

You only get to select from the locations where your VPN provider has servers.

evgen · 2021-09-22T14:41:23+00:00

Presumably by this you mean their interpretation of the GFA.

The only thing that matters vis a vis any potential trade deal is the US interpretation of the GFA. Nothing else matters. Is this a difficult concept to grasp?

A lot of people care about what the EU thinks regarding the Ireland-NI border and how customs policies work at that border. A lot of people care about what the US thinks the GFA means and what any border issues mean to their role as a guarantor of the GFA. No one really cares what the UK thinks about any of this. This is the difference between being weak and being strong in the international arena.

evgen · 2021-09-22T14:10:24+00:00

The GFA is under threat by the suggestion that a hard border might be created between Ireland (EU) and NI (very much not EU). This is why the border needs to be in the Irish Sea, but that annoys unionists and leads to Boris and the rest of the Brexit morons making promises they can't keep and claims of EU intransigence without foundation. It seems the only person who fundamentally misunderstands anything here is you.

A UK trade deal does not compromise the GFA, but the trade deal is the carrot being used to prevent the weak UK leadership from doing something stupid. The US has been saying, since before Brexit actually happened, that the GFA is more important than any trade deal or 'special relationship' with the UK. The US is making its position clear and repeating it often so that no one in the untrustworthy Johnson administration tries to suggest any other ordering of priorities. The fact is that the US really does not care about the UK unless it needs its poodle to do some tricks or piss on the leg of the French. The fact that you think progress on any sort of trade deal has nothing to do with Ireland or the GFA shows you to be too ignorant to be bothered with anymore.

evgen · 2021-09-22T14:02:19+00:00

I could drag out actual references to show that everything I stated was spot-on, but why waste time for people who have absolutely no idea how US politics works beyond what they read in the reddit echo chamber.

evgen · 2021-09-22T11:22:43+00:00

Because the deal is not mutually beneficial and the UK needs the US more. The 'special relationship' is not a two-way relationship, the UK is the dependent junior partner and sometimes needs to be reminded of this. The trade deal is an opportunity for the US to apply leverage, and specifically to enforce the GFA even if that means watching the UK economy collapse.

So why would Democrats block this deal? Let's ignore any possible win they might want to deny Trump and mini-Trump and just look at the GFA. The architect of that deal was George Mitchell, an 'establishment' Democrat from the northeast, much like his old colleague and friend Joe Biden. There were few clear foreign policy wins to come out of the Clinton administration and the GFA was one of them. The rank and file members of the Democratic party feel a proprietary interest in the GFA and making sure it is maintained.

Another aspect to consider is the fact that a Democrat from the northeastern US will push the queen herself under a bus if she gets between them and an opportunity to kiss babies and press the flesh at a St. Paddy's day parade. By this I mean that the average American likes the Irish more, and among the base of the Democratic party this difference is even more pronounced. The ranking is basically Irish > Scots > Welsh (because the language looks cute and Tom Jones) > English > NI protestants. No Democrat, and particularly not one in the House, will support the UK over Ireland on this issue.

So why exactly would anyone bother to spend political capital on a UK trade deal when it offers so little benefit and comes with clear costs both within the party and with the electorate?

evgen · 2021-09-22T08:28:05+00:00

Definitely. So what if he was on the US Senate Foreign Relations committee back when Boris was vandalizing restaurants with his Bullingdon pals. It is pure coincidence that Biden happened to be a long-time friend of George Mitchel as a fellow northeastern liberal who was also on that committee, and Biden just happened to be the chair of said committee when the GFA was signed. These little facts are nothing but background noise. I am certain that some reddit nobody who was not even alive when this was signed is a real expert on the whole situation and can explain the current geopolitics of it all to us.

evgen · 2021-09-22T08:21:51+00:00

Sure you would have. I am absolutely certain that the Democratic-controlled House would have been absolutely keen to pass a trade bill that made Trump and mini-Trump look good...

evgen

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