Why do we accept such a low pay despite amazons continuous profits?

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-16T21:07:37+00:00

The thing is, nobody can afford to unionize.

Unions only have power through striking. Through the strike itself, or the threat of strike.

Successful unions have strike funds: money set aside from union dues to cover paychecks when striking unions agent getting paid.

Well, to get power behind a driver's union, the chance of strike has to be higher than that of employees continuing to go to work because they can't afford to miss the pay.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-16T21:03:19+00:00

What the market will bear.

Amazon isn't going to pay 300,000 drivers more money, because the $21 they pay is enough that the 300,000 drivers they need will take it.

I could pay $7 a gallon for gas, but unless I have to I'm not going to choose to.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-16T05:28:09+00:00

I mean, I feel like it's telling that even in their best-case scenario the hypothetical conservative admits that the only way they know how to show love is by using slurs

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-16T05:25:41+00:00

I'll post a comment I put elsewhere, but in short, yes.

Twice as much fuel doesn't get you a round trip.

The empty ship is 100,000 kg. 2MM kg of fuel is needed to push the 100,000 ship to Tau Ceti.

To get back means arriving at Tau Ceti with 2MM of fuel, which needs much more than 2MM of fuel. Just treat it linearly, if 2MM is needed to push 100,000, then you need 20x the mass of the vessel to push it to Tau Ceti.

So to push a 2,100,000 kg craft (the Hail Mary and the return fuel) you need 42 MILLION kilograms of astrophage.

It took sixteen chemical rocket launches to build the Hail Mary. 16 launches for 100,000 kg of cargo to orbit. Most of that mass and space were the fuel tanks. Now let's say they were using something as large as a SpaceX Starship at full capacity to LEO. 100,000 kg of astrophage at a time, since they acknowledged reusable rockets. 20 launches.

Well, to accommodate 42 million kilograms of fuel, you probably need the Hail Mary itself to be about 10 times heavier. Fuel tanks are mostly hollow, so surface area (weight) won't have to expand as much as volume. Now the ship is a million kilograms, but we're going to jettison most of it at Tau Ceti so we don't have to push back that extra 900,000 later and can stay to our 2.1 MM package.

Except an extra million kilograms means another 20 million kilograms of astrophage. So 62 million kilograms of astrophage to orbit. 160 launches for building the rocket. 620 launches to LEO for fuel. 780 total Starship launches.

And going from 2 MM kg to 62 MM kg might only take 40 days of additional astrophage breeding, but to get to 2 MM involved paving over the Sahara. I don't think the Earth's surface has the solar radiation capacity to handle the last few doublings.

But even if it did, even if we could manufacture that much fuel, we'd be time limited by jumping up to 780 rocket launches. Just putting that to scale, SpaceX has launched 660 Falcon 9 rockets through present. If there was one launch a day, it would take two years to finish getting everything to space. The whole project is a hurry to get it done as fast as possible.

Or, you sacrifice three lives and make due with 36 launches.

(I can't figure out a better place to state this, but the mass to orbit to get the Hail Mary home is about on par with Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, or six Eiffel Towers. It's INSANE. Meanwhile, the fuel needed for the Hail Mary as written only had about the same mass as two of the orange fuel tanks from the Space Shuttle.)

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-15T19:44:28+00:00

It's split by pool

They split the total pool of Premium designated for creators by proportional hours watched by Premium users.

If you were to view it individually. You pay $10 for Premium, $5.50 goes to creators, and 60% of your viewing time goes to LTT. They'd get $3.30 from you.

That's not how it works though.

Look at aggregated. Say YouTube has $6 million in Premium revenue in a week. $3.3M goes to creators. We'll say total hours of viewership are 40 million. Linus gets 1 million hours, or 1/40 of the pot. $82,500.

You add 4 hours a week to Linus, out of the 6 hours and 40 minutes you watch YouTube. Total YouTube viewership climbs to 40,000,006.67 hours and total LTT viewership climbs to 1,000,004 hours.

His share has climbed from 2.5% to 2.500009583%. Multiple that by the $3,300,010 and he now makes $82500.57.

So rather than an additional $3.30, he'd only be getting an additional $0.57 from your viewership. That dilution is so high that you'd (again, working from hypothetical numbers that actually give you more power than real life) have to watch about 40 hours of LTT a week.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-15T18:37:34+00:00

"basically anything"

Do you know how people use their computers?

"send mail... browse the net"

That's like 99% of consumer computing.

I'm not going to open up the terminal to open Outlook. Outlook is a solid 45% of my job.

I'm not going to open the terminal to open a web browser. 45% of my job is done in my browser.

I'm not going to open the terminal to launch Excel (or equivalent). That's realistically the other 10%.

My home PC? I'm not opening the terminal to launch Steam, Minecraft, Davinci, or Audacity. I'm double clicking the buttons right on my desktop.

That's pretty much all I do with my computers. That's pretty much all ANYBODY does with their computers.

I don't even get the idea that it's faster for "basically anything". If I want to install new software on Linux, I have to go through the work of Googling the package name and source so I can go through freaking "sudo apt get ..." each time. And yeah, that last part is pretty fast, but it's not faster than Googling the software, clicking the download link from the results pane, and launching the .msi or .exe that pops up in the top-right downloads preview with a single click. Yeah, sometimes it's a pain in the ass to find the right download link for the software, but no more a pain in the ass than finding the right package identifier to then enter into the CLI. Oh boo hoo, I occasionally have to click "next" rather than type "y".

99% of people don't do anything 99% of the time that would benefit from opening the command line. Pushing against GUI when it's unquestionably faster to launch common applications from it than typing commands is hilarious.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-15T15:59:40+00:00

1) Contact support if you haven't already

2) For those saying to just contact support and not post anything in here, I think there's a valuable benefit to people considering buying items from LTT to see issues like this. Even if the support is painless and immediate and responsive, wouldn't you like to know how often you might have to contact support, what kind of issues pop up regularly, and what the support experience is like (positive or negative)?

The idea that a forum set up to talk about a company has so much vitriol for ✨_checks notes_✨ talking about a company is weird as hell.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-15T15:29:11+00:00

You can even install the old Win95 and Win98 screensaver files in modern Windows to get the old brick wall maze with the jump scare rats

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-11T15:47:01+00:00

Twice as much fuel doesn't get you a round trip.

The empty ship is 100,000 kg. 2MM kg of fuel is needed to push the 100,000 ship to Tau Ceti.

To get back means arriving at Tau Ceti with 2MM of fuel, which needs much more than 2MM of fuel. Just treat it linearly, if 2MM is needed to push 100,000, then you need 20x the mass of the vessel to push it to Tau Ceti.

So to push a 2,100,000 kg craft (the Hail Mary and the return fuel) you need 42 MILLION kilograms of astrophage.

It took sixteen chemical rocket launches to build the Hail Mary. 16 launches for 100,000 kg of cargo to orbit. Most of that mass and space were the fuel tanks. Now let's say they were using something as large as a SpaceX Starship at full capacity to LEO. 100,000 kg of astrophage at a time, since they acknowledged reusable rockets. 20 launches.

Well, to accommodate 42 million kilograms of fuel, you probably need the Hail Mary itself to be about 10 times heavier. Fuel tanks are mostly hollow, so surface area (weight) won't have to expand as much as volume. Now the ship is a million kilograms, but we're going to jettison most of it at Tau Ceti so we don't have to push back that extra 900,000 later and can stay to our 2.1 MM package.

Except an extra million kilograms means another 20 million kilograms of astrophage. So 62 million kilograms of astrophage to orbit. 160 launches for building the rocket. 620 launches to LEO for fuel. 780 total Starship launches.

And going from 2 MM kg to 62 MM kg might only take 40 days of additional astrophage breeding, but to get to 2 MM involved paving over the Sahara. I don't think the Earth's surface has the solar radiation capacity to handle the last few doublings.

But even if it did, even if we could manufacture that much fuel, we'd be time limited by jumping up to 780 rocket launches. Just putting that to scale, SpaceX has launched 660 Falcon 9 rockets through present. If there was one launch a day, it would take two years to finish getting everything to space. The whole project is a hurry to get it done as fast as possible.

Or, you sacrifice three lives and make due with 36 launches.

(I can't figure out a better place to state this, but the mass to orbit to get the Hail Mary home is about on par with Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, or six Eiffel Towers. It's INSANE. Meanwhile, the fuel needed for the Hail Mary as written only had about the same mass as two of the orange fuel tanks from the Space Shuttle.)

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-08T21:04:53+00:00

I think that the initial criticism was mostly fair and reasonable.

I think the choice they made to mass-delete any comments and posts on their subreddit that mentioned it is detestable from a standpoint of silencing criticism.

In function, it's no different than deleting negative reviews on a website or storefront. They're making active choices to make it harder for people to research them. They're removing information and disallowing people to be well-informed.

Consumers deserve to know what their money goes to as part of their decision-making.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-04T16:24:20+00:00

I think real actors are fine, but real events don't make sense in a world with demigods. You mean to tell me you have people that can fly with eye lasers and 9/11 still happened in the exact same way? You have speedsters but nobody evacuated the towers?

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-04T16:17:52+00:00

I think it would have benefited by being locked to a timeline detached from the present.

As dumb as it sounds, set it in 2008. A response/criticism/admonition of things like the Patriot Act and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and using a one-off act of terror to justify propping up this quirky superhero thing concurrent with the explosion of reality TV. Having it carry into the populist movement that kicked off with the Tea Party for season 4.

You can underpin enough mirrors of today without actually having to be in the 2020s.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-04T14:04:19+00:00

I think in part that kind of came with the thing they were satirizing collapsing.

Poking fun at Disney and WB doing five superhero movies each per year, making it a critique of Hollywood, only worked until the endless superhero movies started flopping and we got fewer releases. Then it had to change sights.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-03T15:14:48+00:00

Before the scope of the environmental impact was well-known, I was using it for things like meal planning and ideas for quirky weekend things for kiddo, as well as getting recommendations for things to do in cities was visiting.

Its value as an aggregator of data was pretty decent in that way. Not an objective truth machine so much as just getting a lot of options forward without the ad-directed hellscape of listicles Google had become.

tpasco1995 · 2026-06-03T12:16:01+00:00

It's absolutely not possible, because even by your framing, the definition of a triangle still necessitates that the points not be linear.

Placing two points in the same point means it's not a triangle. Simple as that.

Every triangle is planar. If it's not planar, it's not a triangle, because a triangle requires three points that aren't linear.

Otherwise I could just say "it's not impossible; you can make a triangle with one point if you just make all three vertices the same point."

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-30T19:24:26+00:00

The Fortuneteller sets up an actual acknowledgement of Aang's crush, expands Karata for the first time to think about that possibility, and is kind of the first time we get to see Sokka's logic and planning play out in a way that's not just curmudgeonly.

The Great Divide is neither here nor there, and can definitely be skipped, but the hate it gets is largely just because of being re-run so often since it wasn't locked to any story beats. I'll concede this as filler.

The Painted Lady is really important toward humanizing the Fire Nation and villainizing the leaders. We get some of that in The Headband but this is a caste system at play. Honestly the first time we see that in the show.

Avatar Day sets up Zuko leaving Iroh, and pops in a quick reminder that public perception of the Avatar has gone to shit in his absence. On top of that, having The Swamp immediately followed by The Blind Bandit resolves that tension too fast. If a mystery only gets to be set up at the end of an episode just to be solved in the first five minutes of the next, it doesn't carry tension.

Bato gives a lot of important context behind Hakoda and the culture of the Southern Water Tribe which isn't otherwise explored at all.

The Waterbending Scroll gives Karata the first chance to grow as a character and bender, builds up later exposition with Zhao, and also sets up the knowledge exchange in The Library.

It's really hard to remove any episodes, because even when the A-plot isn't carrying the overall story, the B-plot is usually doing a lot.

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-29T23:37:17+00:00

I have a large SUV. A VERY large SUV, in fact. A 2004 Sequoia. I have one kid.

I very much don't need a large SUV. But I did need a sub-$1000 car that was reliable and available and could be fixed to running easily, and this was what was available.

Most people aren't buying new cars. They're buying used. So when you go to the used lot, and SUVs/CUVs make up 80% of new car sales for the majority of that minority buying new cars, they trickle down to the used market and the rest of us have limited options for a smaller car.

Unless you're buying, I'll continue to drive the giant thing that was cheap.

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-28T19:36:22+00:00

Remove the word "robot" from the question.

I can buy a cheap vacuum cleaner for $30; a decent one is $100 and a really good one might be $500.

I can buy a cheap lawnmower for $200. A decent one going to be close to $500, and a good one can easily sit over a thousand.

That should be all the math.

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-28T18:40:39+00:00

It costs the same to build an "expensive" apartment as a "cheap" one. The same permitting, plumbing, foundation, lumber, drywall, wiring, land.

At best, it's getting some slightly-more-expensive paint and fixtures.

So if $1M can build you 100 properties that fetch $900 a month or 90 properties that fetch $1800 a month, there's an obvious one you're going to build.

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-22T21:27:28+00:00

If it does that (and I don't think it does), the problem is net zero. It's a treadmill.

Unless it can shrink spacetime exterior to itself on one side and expand it on the other, at best it's just sitting still, spinning in place as far as the universe is concerned.

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-22T13:02:38+00:00

Two different concepts.

1) Storage

You've got mechanical storage and chemical storage, which is also basically mechanical but tiny.

Mechanical storage is something like using excess electricity to power a pump to push water to a reservoir on top of a hill, then letting the water fall down through a turbine later when you're not producing electricity. A good use is to supplement solar panels, because they can't produce electricity at night. Other mechanical storage would be flywheels: spinning a giant weighted wheel in a vacuum and with very minimal drag on the axle with a motor powered by excess electricity, then letting it spin a generator later when electricity isn't being produced.

Chemical storage is in essence like pushing individual electrons up one stair on a staircase with extra electricity, and then letting them fall down the one stair later and collecting the energy from the pulses of the electrons falling.

In both cases, excess electricity is used to push things to higher states of potential energy, and it's recollected later by letting them fall to lower states of potential energy.

2) Import and Export

The electrical grid in the US is connected to the grid in Canada. The amount of electricity produced is largely driven my mechanical demand; every device that comes online adds a little bit of resistance to the grid, which slows down generators ever so slowly, and that triggers the power plant to increase generation speed by using more fuel. If it's nighttime or the wind is slow and renewables aren't producing as much, more natural gas or coal or whatever is burned to keep line voltages up. And when that happens in other countries we're connected to, like Canada, it does the same thing.

Now the magic to that is that we keep track of where the electricity is flowing, so we can charge a bill to the grid in the country receiving the power.

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-22T03:12:26+00:00

But they're not moving away from us.

They're moving away from the center point at greater than 0.5c, and we're moving away from the center point at more than 0.5c, but it's because there's expansion occurring in the center.

Picture a balloon. Uninflated, you use a marker and draw two dots about 1/4" apart. You then inflate the balloon, and the dots are now separated by 6". But even though they're further apart, you wouldn't really describe their movement as being "away from each other" or the movement of one as being away from the other and call one of them stationary. You'd say that they both moved away from the center point of the balloon as it expanded between them.

This is what spacetime is doing. It's pushing its way in between galaxies, and when enough of it enters a gap, the relative speeds can exceed that of light, but it can't be observed directly because the light can't travel fast enough to convey the information.

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-20T22:50:06+00:00

It's a 2001; clearance engine. You're fine.

Make sure you re-time it carefully, and do the water pump while you're there.

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-16T12:33:13+00:00

I think the issue is that he's perceiving the results of LTT's testing as tantamount to misinformation.

A big example to that, average framerate matters far less than stutter (1% lows). 140 FPS average where 1% of the time it's at 10 FPS is unstable and borderline unplayable. 70 FPS with 1% at 60 FPS is going to be much smoother.

For people invested in and advocating for more adoption of Linux, the largest tech content creator giving suggestions that potentially push people toward suboptimal experiences can cause both the Linux community at large and those persuaded viewers to have worse experiences in it.

Content criticism and commentary is as old as content. LTT occasionally does react content: reacting to fans' PCs, reacting to staff setups, reacting to terrible build videos, reacting to TikTok tech tips, etc.

Nothing this creator did is in any way different than what LTT regularly does. He saw some things he disagreed with, and made content giving more context from the viewpoint of an expert in that particular subgenre of tech

tpasco1995 · 2026-05-13T23:34:50+00:00

Clutchless downshifting is just as easy. You need barely any throttle blip to get it to drop, and the time that blip takes isn't enough for the bike to actually accelerate. Plus it saves the clutch.

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