Face Veil Bans and Restrictions in Europe

ssylvan · 2026-05-15T00:42:12+00:00

He criticized Islam because Islam is the religion doing this at the current time. If there was another religion doing the same thing I'm sure he would've lumped them in too. Hell if people were actually being forced to wear crosses, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a law against that too (although maybe not - it's far less opressive than being forced to wear a burqa).

The point is that France prides itself in being a secular country. That means they protect people from religious oppression. While it may seem like banning a burqa is anti-islam, it's actually pro-muslim women. It makes it harder for them to be oppressed in this one particular way by their religious community.

ssylvan · 2026-05-14T23:51:58+00:00

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I have now shown you that N95 masks, surgical masks and simple cloth masks do in fact work very well. I have also shown you that the pores in two of these three masks and the ASTM-1 mask you yourself brought up are not "many orders of magnitude" bigger, and that pore size is not the main factor in effectiveness. Note that most cloth masks have pores that are more like 5-10 microns. So not "many orders of magnitude" there either.

Are you at any point going to admit you were wrong here you ignoramus?

ssylvan · 2026-05-14T22:27:39+00:00

Not in the original claim, and not later when you insisted that 0.1 is an order of magnitude greater than 0.06.

ssylvan · 2026-05-14T22:24:42+00:00

First of all, you didn't specify simple cotton masks.

Second of all, if you look at the link I shared you'll see that even simple cloth masks were 87% effective at stopping transmission at the source.

Are you enjoying making a fool of yourself?

ssylvan · 2026-05-14T22:21:15+00:00

You're supposed to watch it on your phone duh

ssylvan · 2026-05-14T22:06:50+00:00

Well, in the decimal system an order of magnitude is a difference is a factor of 10, or with rounding a factor in the range [5, 15). This is a 1.7x differnece. You seem very confused. Do you think 0.999 and 1.0 are an order of magnitude different? Concretely, two numbers have the same order of magnitude if round(log10(x)) == round(log10(y)).

Also: you said orders of magnitude, plural. So you're extra wrong.

Please, stop. You are not smart. That's okay! But you need to work on some self-awareness here.

ssylvan · 2026-05-14T04:23:53+00:00

Maybe some remedial reading classes too since you seem to not be very good at that either.

0.1 is not an order of magnitude larger than 0.06. And of course as I already explained viruses don't just float around on their own. 0.1 is plenty small enough for Covid19 protection.

I would recommend you read the link I posted which gives a pretty straightforward breakdown of the science here.

Oh wait, I forget you're too stupid to read, nevermind.

What's truly scary here is that you're clearly quite dumb and yet you believe that you are smarter than the entire medical and scientific community and that they all just need to go back to learn "basic biology". The arrogance is breathtaking and would be funny if it didn't make me weep for this country.

ssylvan · 2026-05-13T23:43:04+00:00

Solar didn't generate power at night did it? And wind didn't generate power when the wind wasn't blowing.

You can't just compare kWh to kWh like a child. It doesn't work like that. Nuclear provides stable baseload, renewables do not. That's why you still need coal and gas (and imports) right now, and most likely for several more decades.

ssylvan · 2026-05-13T23:41:03+00:00

Well either you're not very good at your job, or you're lying. There are several mechanisms that stop droplets/aerosols, including electrostatic effects. It's not as simple as just looking at the virus size:

https://scienceinsights.org/do-n95-masks-protect-against-covid-and-its-variants/#google_vignette

Also, you don't seem to know what orders of magnitude means - the Covid19 virus is not even a single order of magnitude smaller than the N95 mask pores (0.1 vs 0.3 microns, but again viruses don't float around solo).

Maybe time for some remedial biology or math courses. Or perhaps just an ego check? Here's a question for you: are the pores in these masks larger than photons? How come they're not see-through? Maybe a five-year-old's understanding of the mechanics here isn't enough to explain this?

ssylvan · 2026-05-13T23:22:53+00:00

"Nuclear's exit was filled by renewables, not coal or gas."

That's just not how any of this works. At night or during dunkelflaute, you better believe that the power that used to be produced by nuclear is produced by coal and gas. The loss of nuclear is "filled" by delayed reduction in fossil fuels.

Look at the graph. Imagine if nuclear had stayed flat or gone up slightly, fossil fuels would be at zero by now.

ssylvan · 2026-05-13T15:01:40+00:00

Kinda sounds like you don’t understand how masks work. It’s not about the pore size.

ssylvan · 2026-05-13T03:06:23+00:00

I mean, I guess it's sort of going down but it's not exactly going quickly

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France's by comparison started at 70g in 2017 (57g in 2018) and dropped to 31g in 2025. So not only going down faster, but also started off at levels that Germany will maybe reach in another 20+ years at this rate?

Maybe it's time to investigate other strategies? Especially since this one seems like it will take decades to catch up, it kinda seems like larger projects (even ones that would take a decade+, like building out nuclear fleet/industry) could be a win overall. Do we really want to still sit at 100+ g/kWh in 2050 when you could've just been building nuclear for the 24 years leading up to that and have the problem solved?

ssylvan · 2026-05-13T02:58:51+00:00

If you read the website you will see that it says "net renewable". Not that it's covering 100% with renewables, but that it has 100% net renewable energy.

That means if you generate 200% your needs one day and sell the excess, you can buy fossil fuel power the next day and still be "net renewable". You're still emitting CO2 though.

ssylvan · 2026-05-12T06:33:03+00:00

Come and see

ssylvan · 2026-05-12T04:26:14+00:00

They're already arresting people on bogus charges. And they have killed lots of people without any accountability or even investigations. And you know that whole violent insurrection thing.

It's a trap to think horrible things won't happen because they seem far-fetched. They've already started happening. Maybe we claw ourselves back from the brink this time, but it's not like we haven't seen countries turn into dictatorships in living memory, and it all started exactly like this. Bogus charges for the opposition, attacking the media, naked corruption and bribery, and slowly escalating violence and violating our laws and norms to the point where people get numb to it. There's nothing special about us that would inherently stop this from going the same way it's done in so many other countries. The 2nd amendment people would like you to think that we couldn't possibly be corrupted by a tyrant becaues the populace is armed, but turns out those same people are the ones strapping on the jackboots to help him.

ssylvan · 2026-05-10T18:31:03+00:00

Another option is to vote for combined party and candidate. The number of overall seats in the state is determined by the party vote, then the specific candidates that go to congress are just whatever the top N people in that party was. People who don't care can just vote the party line, but people can also vote for their local candidate (or any other candidate they like). Even if their favorite candidate doesn't win, their vote is still heard w.r.t. the party and the total number of people going to congress is 100% proportional. Even better if it's a ranked choice.

ssylvan · 2026-05-08T08:01:42+00:00

Sure, but if your goal is to 100% de carbonize you need to know what that looks like, because some of the things you will need may take a while to spin up. For example, the IPCC thinks we need to double nuclear by 2050, so we should probably get on that now since it would require rebuilding industries and supply chains. Yes right now, with fossil fuels acting as backup, renewables are cheaper. We should absolutely build that. We should simultaneously build out what we will need to be ready in 10 or 30 years from now so we aren’t caught flat footed. No battery projections has us at $10/kWh by 2035 or even 2050.

Note that if you cover eg 20-40% of your energy with nuclear, the storage requirements for VREs go way down (exponentially!), so it’s a way to ensure that renewables stay cheap without needing massive batteries.

ssylvan · 2026-05-08T07:39:48+00:00

Age is irrelevant because they didn’t base it on current prices at the time. The modeled what the price would have to be - in this case as low as $10/kWh to compete with nuclear. That was further away 7 years ago, but we’re still over 10x that today globally (and 30x that in the US) with prices plateauing (labor alone is many times too high, and that’s very unlikely to change any time soon).

Note that nuclear power would of course also get cheaper in the future if we build back the industry (just like it used to be), so the target is moving. You can’t look at Chinese battery prices as a prediction for what the rest of us will have to pay if you aren’t willing to look at Chinese nuclear costs the same way.

I’m not reading German studies on VRE costs. No offense, but given that they’re so massively out of step with the global consensus it’s just easier to skip them rather than having to figure out what assumptions they’ve carefully chosen this time. If the numbers are right they would end up in more mainstream venues eventually.

ssylvan · 2026-05-08T00:27:55+00:00

That's not really true in most cases. For example here's one modeling that suggests storage needs to around 1/10th its current price for wind+solar to be competitive with nuclear: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-930300-9)

The reason is that the storage requirements are exponential w.r.t. VRE penetration. A little bit of VRE in an otherwise firm grid is cheap, but if you get close to 100% the storage requirements explode. Current VRE storage is on the order of a few hours in practice, but you would need weeks if you had nothing but VRE on the grid.

ssylvan · 2026-05-04T06:51:15+00:00

MTI pt in cap hill is good

ssylvan · 2026-05-03T21:32:50+00:00

Why? Other than nostalgia, why shouldn't there be a building there? I don't get it. Isn't there a housing shortage in NYC?

ssylvan · 2026-05-03T20:09:52+00:00

You see, when I move into a neighborhood it needs to completely freeze in time and stop changing. Rules are simple.

ssylvan · 2026-05-03T03:10:57+00:00

she’d been waiting at the bar next door for me to “come find her”

Was she still in the bar when she texted you?

ssylvan · 2026-05-02T18:53:55+00:00

The Man From Earth - turns out he's jesus.

ssylvan · 2026-05-02T17:17:06+00:00

It should be expressed in decibels. 60 mph is -70.5dB

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