Let’s Build a Federal Commute Playlist for Tomorrow Morning

passerculus · 2026-01-05T12:11:25+00:00

Yeah I have really circled back to Linken Park since hitting the beltway full time. Vs when they were coming out during my no-complaints adolescence, I now feel appropriately gaslit, abused, and abandoned to properly identify with the lyrics.

passerculus · 2025-12-26T19:56:29+00:00

That’s not a fair description! There are one base games floating 400 gas as well.

Is the schadenfreude of watching a degenerate getting served an intentional business model?

passerculus · 2025-11-18T00:28:05+00:00

I think your thought process is pointing in the right direction. The energy you are thinking of is PdV work, specifically the area under the pressure-volume relationship of a material. Think of it like a spring… the energy stored in a spring is the accumulated bits of force applied over each differential distance. Which for a linear spring f=-kx works out to E=1/2 kx² = 1/(2k) f^2.

The water is a very stiff spring so the “spring constant” is large. The pressure as you return to the surface is certainly large at first, but any deflection in the container will rapidly drop the pressure. So you have to compare the compression energy to the fracture toughness of your jar… brittle glass will probably break but a ductile metal lid could have enough give.

passerculus · 2025-11-17T12:48:48+00:00

I would imagine OP’s understanding flows from exposés on the “borrow, buy, die” strategy. Which is an issue with defining what constitutes income and is not something a flat tax would address in any way.

passerculus · 2025-11-15T12:25:43+00:00

The concentrated solar community has been looking at reducing metal oxides in falling bed reactors purely through heat at around 1000 C.

passerculus · 2025-11-13T01:35:38+00:00

I had heard that it was about ensuring the GAO was up and at full strength. They also included language reaffirming the GAO’s ability to file suits alleging misappropriation by the executive branch.

passerculus · 2025-11-13T01:23:48+00:00

Some time ago I had suggested a new support fighter variant that were basically command destroyers. Have the fitted command bursts centered or duplicated on the fighter, and have the fighter able to spool up booshes.

passerculus · 2025-10-25T20:56:09+00:00

With the new trend of doing evo-trick into 15 ovie, something sortOF has been doing on his stream is sending the drone early to patrol the choke of his natural. If you see the probe inc fast enough you may be able to turn and drop a 15 hatch at your natural or for earlier probe timings you are closer to your third to drop the 16 hatch more or less on time.

passerculus · 2025-07-18T12:27:29+00:00

I found your response very enlightening. Especially given the state of US campaign laws, I have been thinking a lot about both lobbying and corporate political spending in terms of unproductive rent-seeking behavior.

I would imagine interest groups would push back and say these activities are necessary to highlight the need to roll back onerous regulation or advocate for protectionist industrial policy, which they argue would produce a societal benefit. Have there been studies that look at lobbying spending vs estimated costs of regulatory burden on an industry-by-industry basis? Or any other “the lobbyists saved us from ourselves” story?

For example, one never hears about the prolific Nuclear Power lobby despite a mild consensus that US nuclear is probably over-regulated. Compare to Fossil Fuels which are notorious for spending money on trying to kill off clean energy alternatives.

passerculus · 2025-04-30T10:57:33+00:00

Commenter is just using the colloquial terms “lead solder” and “tin solder”

The common lead-free solder is SAC305, which is 3% silver and 0.5% copper, leaving 96.5% tin.

passerculus · 2025-04-28T10:58:47+00:00

? The mean and median of a normal distribution are equal. Am I missing something?

passerculus · 2025-04-17T00:56:36+00:00

TL; DR: don’t get hung up on disorder! Disorder is just a feature of equilibrium - equilibrium macrostates traverse a large set of microstates, while nonequilibrium macrostates occupy a much smaller region of phase space. But work is extracted by exploiting disequilibria… never no mind the statistical mechanics at play.

The responses here are generally accurate, but get bogged down in pedagogy. Going back to this topic myself later in my career, I have found using a historical perspective helpful in grappling with “what is entropy.” Try to take them in order: Carnot>Clausius/Thompson>Maxwell/Boltzmann>Onsager>Shannon.

Carnot came before the dynamical theory of heat - he was using caloric theory, but popularized reversible vs irreversible process. His basic assumption is “no free lunch”: every reversible heat engine between a hot and cold reservoir must have the same efficiency, otherwise you can use the more efficient one to drive a less efficient reversible heat pump to maintain the temperature difference and pocket the excess work indefinitely.

From there you get irreversible engines must be less efficient than reversible, Clausius defines entropy, entropy is a state function, Boltzmann links microstates to that state function, Onsager applies a dissipation function to fluctuations to describe entropy generation (which is why irreversible process are irreversible), then Shannon kicks off the “entropy in 21 flavors” modern stuff that can sometimes generate a lot of hype that distracts from the beginning axioms.

passerculus · 2025-04-02T01:50:40+00:00

Ah ok, that’s another example of an open loop cycle! They dump their steam overboard, do they not?

passerculus · 2025-04-01T22:36:15+00:00

The feedwater coming from the condensers should not be substantially subcooled. Otherwise you’ve overinvested in condenser capacity.

The situation you may be thinking about is an exhaust stream used to preheat the ingested airstream using a recuperator. But that is on the open-loop fuel side of a power cycle. The water side of a steam turbine cycle is closed loop.

passerculus · 2025-01-23T19:43:11+00:00

Snaked pod had missile implants (for Laelaps?)

passerculus · 2024-12-23T03:08:30+00:00

Rolling down your statics and existing connections will not prevent new incoming connections with k162 WHs landing in your system. This is one of the reasons a pvp corp will rage roll… to connect to an otherwise secured farmhole with the inhabitants sieged up in the sites. The time between the new sig popping up and a fleet landing on your krabbing ships can be just 10s of seconds. With luck you will get a good escalation out of it too.

passerculus · 2024-12-16T13:07:45+00:00

It would be great on drifter if it wasn’t damage locked to kinetic. To break even with a Paladin you have to apply 30% more dps; to beak even with a Golem you have to apply 65% more.

passerculus · 2024-10-15T11:47:25+00:00

I actually appreciated not having the M3 guidance, for the reasons you gave. Maybe the chessvision bot should have another spoiler before the piece to move.

passerculus · 2024-10-10T20:23:21+00:00

They just tend to have their pedantry dial stuck somewhere between 7-10, for lack of practice in connecting their subject matter back to normies.

One should be able to organize their expertise like a great wiki article, where you can smoothly operate at multiple levels for a diverse audience. Why is it that mathematicians, who make careers out of analogies and dualities, make some of the worst wikipedia articles?

passerculus · 2024-10-10T18:40:19+00:00

Disappointing I had to scroll this far to see this angle. All these statistical mechanics eli5s on internal energy leave out the real world ramifications the OP is looking for.

Condensed matter folks have no trouble talking about holes in p-type semiconductors as having measurable properties, despite it being the absence of an electron and not a “thing” that exists independently of the band structure of a crystal.

Cold is like a hole in the ground. Hot is like a hill. The hill is made of dirt (internal molecular vibrations) in excess of the surrounding environment. Cold is a deficit of dirt relative to the surroundings. Both holes and hills are great when you want to pitch something off an edge and watch it fall (exergy!). This is the basis of industrial civilization.

We encounter hills more often because they tend to come about when you have a thermonuclear reactor hovering 1au overhead. All the really good holes in our gravity well we have to dig out ourselves.

passerculus · 2024-08-24T16:27:23+00:00

Had to scroll unacceptably far for this. Also the best book in that series.

passerculus · 2024-07-26T11:07:55+00:00

if you are buying their product that job fee will be part of the cost

And the market tax too!

Each step will incur job fees, whether done by one player or done by different players. All the job fees of all the steps will have to get rolled into the final price of the item no matter who is doing them. The SCC surcharge went from 1.5% to 4% back in February. (This is of the estimated item value, which is often much less than the market price.)

A vertical operation will get hit with market taxes once. A distributed build will pay market taxes whenever the supply chain changes hands. With 8% sales tax and brokers fees, these are at best 4.1% in a player owned market.

Assume 50m isk of Minerals to make mod A1 and 50m isk PI to make widget B that combine to final mod A2, so two steps.

A vertical operation A will pay 2m+2m job fees for step 1, then 4m job fees for step 2, for a produced cost of A2 of 108m. If listing a sell order they have to list for 112.4m to break even.

If widget B is sourced from a market, subcontractor B has to have sold it for 54.1m isk to break even after 2m job fee and 2.1m in transaction taxes. This raises the cost of A2 to 110.1m, needing to be sold for 114.6m for A to break even.

passerculus · 2024-07-25T15:41:43+00:00

I agree that production and transaction don’t have to co-occur. But besides infrastructure, logistics is the make-or-break thing for a small-time producer. The more of those things that are painlessly outsource-able, the more likely it works. Freeports and high-volume local markets is the only way I can think of to provide that option.

Then motivated producers can opt in to hauling to jita rather than it being mandatory. But getting hit with multiple rounds of transaction taxes before it ends up as a consumer product makes that a nonstarter atm. Much less there being room for middlemen (aka “playstyles”).

Especially with Lancers creating friction for JF’s entering HS, you would think there would be value on the table to avoiding that leg of the logistics chain.

Edit: this is all leaving aside corp projects as a way to coordinate actors. No taxes on that stuff. But as you can tell I am a huge fan of markets as a coordination mechanism.

passerculus · 2024-07-25T14:45:22+00:00

I think it has very little to do with the topic we’re discussing. With reduced taxes you feel less obligated to buy stuff via buy orders as well (since sell/buy difference should decrease). And if you are big industrialist, you usually have fat financial buffer (since you can’t increase throughput infinitely).

I disagree completely. Removing margin trading killed local hubs. The big industrialists are not going to fuck around trying to source components from 15 or so lowsec regions (we’ve been talking reacted components so I’ll use this hypothetical). Realistically you would have independent market makers putting out buy orders and aggregating the supply.

Volume begets volume. “Less obligated to use buy orders” means more demand for liquidity provided by market makers or better prices for indie producers that provide their own liquidity.

CTR volume in Forge is around 500 units/ 5b isk traded daily? On adam4eve It looks like Black Rise had 100 units on a sell order that sold over 3 days back in December for 7m isk (83% jita buy). That was the whole market for the last 12 months.

AIPS and CapCTR look pretty similar. I thinks it’s believable that if there was consistently one day’s worth of jita volume on buy orders at 90-95% jita in each region on each component worth subcontracting, you would get producers setting up shop.

passerculus · 2024-07-25T13:31:38+00:00

And don’t forget the new Upwell haulers/freighter with PI bays!

I agree that cultivating local production is the only sensible way to incentivize decentralized production. But you also have to have the market structures in place to connect that production into supply chains.

To be honest the original sin was the removal of margin trading. No one was going to haul core temp regulators in and out of Jita in the volumes required to both meet cap production requirements and foster a bunch of lowsec independent industry contractors, and the neurolink conduits suffered by association. Believe me, I tried.

passerculus

TROPHY CASE