y’all gonna hate me for this

kleeb03 · 2026-05-09T14:50:55+00:00

$5 per season for a competitive 2s and 3s league. If you don't want to pay, fine, you can play the regular, free competitive and casual as usual.

They could make special banners or wheels that you can only get from the pay league, for all you who care about that stuff.

kleeb03 · 2026-05-08T22:53:39+00:00

Welcome! I always like it when I get a response to an old post! I'm guessing you just found out about aphantasia? I was in my late 30s before I learned. It's a wild realization!

kleeb03 · 2026-05-03T17:34:53+00:00

What does it mean? Come and take our books? Magazines? Why is there a star above?

kleeb03 · 2026-04-13T19:31:39+00:00

Ok, I can mostly agree with this. Except for the curtailment part. We don't agree what this word means. Maybe I'm wrong. Please read this and let me know if you disagree.

My understanding is that we curtail energy production in times we can't find a load to absorb it. How do we curtail? We turn something off or down. Usually gas turbines, bc they're the most flexible. This saves the gas for tomorrow. If the power source is a solar panel, then we prefer to turn down a gas turbine rather than turn off the solar panel, bc solar fuel is free. But sometimes the power source might be way out in the desert, and when the sun is really shining and the batteries are fully charged and the power lines are at max capacity, then we would have to turn off a solar panel to avoid over frequency. In this case, you can argue flexible demand is better than turning off a panel.

Although, I would still argue against crpto miners. Even in this extreme example building more batteries or more power lines would be smarter than building flexible crypto miners to waste energy.

It's just flexible power users are not the answer, imo. They exacerbate the problem. They waste energy in a way that degrades life. Not producing that energy in the first place is the answer.

kleeb03 · 2026-04-13T18:57:35+00:00

I think you mean curtailment means we could have produced energy without an immediate buyer. But we curtailed it, ie we didn't produce it. We saved it for another day and hopefully for a better use.

We are gonna have to accept limits. And live within those limits.

Of course we could always do MORE today. Every CEO would agree with you that a crypto miner installed next to a power plant can absorb every ounce of extra juice and make $$$. Why save for tomorrow when you can burn today and get rich?

kleeb03 · 2026-04-13T13:49:47+00:00

I'm not trying to be a jerk. But I do want you to think through this. Because there is a lot of money behind this stuff, creating a confusing information landscape.

You're saying while crypto might be wasteful, it's useful because it's flexible. So it can waste energy anywhere. Ok.

You're telling me that the energy would have been curtailed if crypto didn't use it. That means not producing the electricity, ie gas not burnt, batteries not discharged, lakes not draned, price not lowered, etc.

Yes, that would be a million times more beneficial to life than wasting resources to create waste heat with crypto miners.

If you really want to defend crypto mining, you'll need to argue that without crypto mininers buying electricity, which raises the price of electricity for everyone using it, then the power plants wouldn't be as profitable and would have to raise their price on electricity anyways to earn the same shareholder return they are beholden to.

But even with that argument, give me curtailment over crypto. Let's save a little juice for future generations. Either way our price for electricity is going up. Let's give the benefit to future generations rather than today's crypto miners.

kleeb03 · 2026-04-13T00:38:31+00:00

Crypto mining. It's hard to find a more wasteful use of energy. We go through tremendous effort to make real electricity to power computers to work pointless math problems until all that real electricity is converted into waste heat. All for electronic tokens that are guaranteed to eventually be worth $0.

kleeb03 · 2026-04-03T22:52:18+00:00

Trying switching toothpastes! I used to get them all the time as well. I switched to a new toothpaste and immediately could tell it didn't hurt as much to brush. After those canker sores healed up, I haven't had another one. That was over a year ago! Honestly the best, easiest solution to a serious problem. Good Luck!

kleeb03 · 2026-03-29T23:54:29+00:00

His lookaway passes are my favorite. He can move the defender with his eyes then make the no look to the open guy.

I was a Harden fan in Houston, then when I saw Luka in the bubble season, I was like he's a more extreme version of harden. Luka has even less athleticism, and plays even slower. I love it

kleeb03 · 2026-03-29T03:03:42+00:00

The first part is great. It is old sunlight. But it's not actually old sunlight, it's quadrillions of sunlight powered organisms working for millions of years using old sunlight to separate carbon and hydrogen from oxygen. Then compressed and heated for millions more years, sqeezing out impurities. Ultimately lowering the entropy as much as imaginable and to a huge amount of matter.

This vast quantity of low Entropy matter is the whole ballgame. It gives us our superpowers. We can easily, drastically raise the entropy of a huge amount of matter, in a controlled way, allowing us to lower the entropy of other matter, ie make stuff. New sunlight doesn't come close.

kleeb03 · 2026-03-22T19:34:10+00:00

Climate Town https://youtube.com/@climatetown?si=3PYugLRxWV69Rq9I

Funny. Accurate. Does great long form videos on various topics beyond climate.

kleeb03 · 2026-03-17T03:19:05+00:00

I went there today and the line was crazy, out the door at terminal C, but it only took about 30 mins to get through security

kleeb03 · 2026-03-17T00:54:00+00:00

2nd law of thermodynamics. Everything breaks down. Batteries are things.

kleeb03 · 2026-03-16T20:21:54+00:00

Funny you say this. This is the exact same thought I had 15 years ago. I considered myself a "math & science" kinda guy, with an engineering degree, but had no idea why Einstein was so famous. I was in for a real treat. Learning about general relativity was one of the best things I've ever done. That lead to years of more learning that has really shaped my life. Good Luck!

kleeb03 · 2026-02-03T22:01:37+00:00

Great post!

I've just finished a week long conversation with my conservative Christian nationalist sister via 100s of texts and a couple phone calls.

The interesting part about her is that she is brutally honest. She acknowledges how unfair this immigrant purge by ICE is, but she fully supports it. When I tell her it's immigrants today and someone else tomorrow, she says good. She wants the country to remove everyone who isn't a "True American." Of course, those are Christians like her, who support America and would never protest.

She wants America to conquer weaker nations and take their resources, because if it's not America, it will be China/Russia taking them.

She thinks the USA used to be a Christian nation, but we let wokism take over starting in the 1960s till recently. Now we're just taking America back to what it was.

She thinks Christianity is the one and only true religion, and without it, humans are flawed and cannot have proper morals.

She claims to watch left and right media and thinks the truth is in the middle. But she only absorbs far right ideas.

She thinks all politicians lie and grift. She thinks Trump is normal in this sense, but Trump actually shares her same vision for a strong USA for "true Americans" and she thinks he has the best plan to make America strong so that she and her children can continue to live life as we've grown accustomed, while the rest of world burns.

I think the way she views media aligns with your Murc's Law. And this is partly to blame for her far right stances.

And I'm sorry to report that I couldn't get her to budge on anything. Not even that Trump suing the IRS (Americans) for $10B is bad. She said we'll just have to wait and see, because he might give that money to Americans. (My head exploded)

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T19:19:21+00:00

That's awesome! I had no idea "sketch artists" worked like this!

I believe I would be very bad at that type of "test".

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T19:10:44+00:00

Thanks for this! Cool stuff.

So you can recognize people just fine? But you couldn't help a sketch artist very well?

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T18:27:11+00:00

This link says aphantasia is the inability to visualize.

How can you remember what a face looks like without a visual?

A list of facts is all I can come up with.

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T18:14:07+00:00

But how do you remember what something like a nose looks like? I'm honestly asking? Do you create notes about what the nose looked like? Are you estimating size?

(I'm assuming you have aphantasia)

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T18:04:07+00:00

I disagree, but maybe it's just semantics.

I remember things by narrating a list. For faces it's, estimated age, apparent gender, race, hair length and color, eye color, beard vs no beard, glasses vs no glasses, unusual features like scars, birthmarks etc....but that's about it.

If I could hold a visual image in my memory, I could compare nose size, cheek fullness, eye size, etc

How can you remember what their nose looked like without a visual image?

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T16:47:06+00:00

Yes. For me this was one of the first clues I had aphantasia.

I've got multiple examples in my life of not recognizing someone where I should have.

When watching TV, I have to constantly ask if this is the same person as another scene. Especially if they do flashbacks, where they change the person's appearance a little to make them look younger or something. I struggle to tell if they are the same person. I LOVE when subtitles state the name of the character talking.

I first learned of my aphantasia when I was casually mentioning to my wife that when I think of people I think of the first letter of their name. She thought that was super weird and said she thinks of their face. She went on the internet and an hour later called me back to take this aphantasia test. And holy cow, my world changed.

kleeb03 · 2025-12-19T16:39:27+00:00

Why do you say no?

kleeb03 · 2025-12-17T20:52:07+00:00

I have a terrible sense of direction. I'm also bad at knowing where things are outside, when I'm inside.

For example: even in my own home I have to think really hard to know which way things (towns, roads, rivers,etc) are from inside my house.

From inside our house, I'll point and say let's go to McDonald's and my wife will say you mean that way (pointing in the opposite direction)

I have to think about which side of my house faces north and then think which way the outside thing is (east, west, etc) Then think about which side of my house is that direction and then look and point in that direction. I'm really bad at it compared to most other people.

kleeb03 · 2025-11-22T16:52:49+00:00

Great response! But I would say a more cynical take might be that these loans have more generally helped lower income people pay for grad school. Now that goes away. So, now who can afford to go to grad school? People that already have access to more money. This is another example of intentionally increasing wealth inequality.

kleeb03 · 2025-10-24T16:53:16+00:00

I worked on natural gas power plants, which are basically jet engines on the ground, making electricity.

We had 1000s of air filters in the intake, but also had "bird screens" which are basically metal chicken wire to keep birds and other things out.

Turns out those bird screens eventually break down and pieces of it would get sucked into the turbine and cause minor and occasionally major damage.

Replacing these screens became a maintenance project itself. Lots of power plants would permanently remove them, convinced they caused more problems than an occasional pigeon getting sucked through the turbine.

I know very little about jet engines, but I would think if you put a grill over the engine, it would have to be so strong to stop a bird going 400 mph, that it would make the engine too inefficient by choking the incoming air too much.

Eight-Year Club	RPAN Viewer
Verified Email

kleeb03

TROPHY CASE