One time, i triggered some sort of shoplifting detection when I put my credit card up in my purse after paying. I guess the camera thought I did it in a sketchy way?

Leggo my prego?

Wouldn’t that only be correct about 25% of the time?

Makes sense to me, but there’s still the whole microplastics issue… But honestly, at this point, anything we can do to keep fossil fuels in the ground is a win in my book. I’d love to see us go down that path for plastic needs that are both necessary and supremely difficult to replace with other materials (like medical and laboratory applications), and stop using plasitic entirely for everything else.

a lot less. we’re talking ~2 microns (ie: 2 micrometers or 0.002mm). For context, the width of an “average” human hair ranges from 18 to 180 microns (there’s a lot of variability due to age, ethnicity, and lifestyle).

If you want to see for yourself, you can dissolve the aluminum to leave just the lining (scrub any paint off the outside of the can first). You can use a solution with pH either lower than 3 or higher than 12.5. For context, draino is about 12 on the pH scale, and coca-cola is about 2.5, but the closer you are to neutral, the longer it will take (so while you could theoretically use the soda inside the can, that will take quite a while). There are sulfuric acid drain cleaners that get down into the 1 to 2 pH range (though note that pH is a log scale, so that’s on the order of 10 to 100 times more acidic than the cola and will fuck your shit up if you aren’t careful).

For whatever you choose to use, be sure to look up safe handling and disposal recommendations before attempting, or simply watch this youtube video instead!

I have always used an ad blocker in the browser, but i recently jumped on the DNS blocking train and it’s like a whole new kind of awesome on my phone in particular.

There are some times when i believe i’m only as old as i feel. And there are other times when i realize i’m actually just Abe Simpson with an onion still on my belt yelling at clouds.

I’m actually kind of OK with that b/c it pushes it to the bottom of the comments, so it’s out of the way but still easy to find if i’m curious.

Do you think that rich people should have to serve shorter prison sentences because their time is more valuable? Do you at least SEE the parallel I’m trying to draw here?

And I already admitted that I don’t know what the optimal metric is. I just know that a flat fine that is the same for everyone, without taking into account their financial situation at all, is unfair.

I prefer the way the Hobbits do it: 12 months of 30 days, then 5 (or 6) days straight of winter holiday/new year festivities. But I would totally get behind this calendar in a heartbeat, too.

I agree that everyone should be equal under the law, but that doesn’t mean that fixed fines are fair. The same amount of money has a different value to different people, and that perceived value changes depending on one’s income and wealth.

IDK if you saw my edit in my previous response with the community service example, but I think that might help clear up where we’re diverging. If it takes me 10 hours of work to make enough money to pay the fine, but it takes you 100 hours of work to pay the fine for the exact same offense because our salaries are different, were we really punished equally?

1. stealing != traffic violation. while stealing may have a fine associated with it, it’s generally based on restitution for the goods stolen + legal fees etc. So, you’re moving the goal posts on me, and my feelings about how to handle theft of necessities is tangential to the discussion (for the record, my feelings are: if you see someone stealing necessities, no you didn’t).

2. You seem to not be getting that the goal should be equal deterrence regardless of income or wealth or whatever the most fair metric happens to be. IDK what the baseline fine should be, nor what the most fair way to scale the fines should be b/c i’m a chemist, not a sociologist or legal scholar. But at the end of the day, if the only punishment is a fine, the wealthy don’t have to give a shit.

Edit: for #2, let’s use time instead of money. If instead of paying a $1000 fine, you could do community service. But the “value” of your community service is tied to your wage/salary. So, someone making $10/hr has to do 100 hrs of community service, while someone else making $100/hr only has to do 10 hrs of community service. Is that still fair in your view?

if the goal of the fine is to deter people from committing a traffic violation, the person making $150k will not be equally deterred compared to the person making $75k. If the fine has too little impact, it no longer works as a deterrent. This is especially true for things like parking tickets, where you aren’t necessarily putting yourself or others in danger like you might be for speeding (though, assuming the two people only differ in their income and all other variables – like how willing they are to drive dangerously – remain equal, then the point still stands).

in this context, i meant it as “paradoxical”. since i can work hard and persevere, but i’m also a bit lazy about it all. Like, have you ever dropped your phone on the floor when lying in bed and come up with some absurd bodily contortion to reach it without physically leaving the bed? But you could have just gotten up and grabbed it and laid back down in much less time with much less energy spent overall? That’s the kind of diligent slothfulness that I am quite prone to.

sloth and diligence. i am a conundrum, but a somewhat stoic one i guess?

y’all remember the “ring back” tones? i don’t think they ever really took off since they are a ring tone that people hear when they call you instead, which is… just… totally idiotic… but i did encounter it a few times in the wild.

Coincidentally, -196°C is the boiling point of Nitrogen

thanks for sharing this. i’ve been interested in rust for a bit now, and this might get me off my ass :)

It’s like arguing that a kilogram of feathers weighs less than a kilogram of bowling balls because the scale goes up less for every feather I put on the scale compared to every bowling ball I put on the scale.

I’m arguing that infinity bowling balls weighs more than infinity feathers, though

but in this case we are comparing the growth rate of two functions

oh, you mean like taking the ratio of the derivatives of two functions?

it’s like the elementary school playground argument saying “infinity + 1” there is no “infinity + 1”, it’s just infinity

but that’s not the scenario. The question is whether $100x is more valuable than $1x as x goes to infinity. The number of bills is infinite (and you are correct that adding one more bill is still infinity bills), but the value of the money is a larger $infinity if you have $100 bills instead of $1 bills.

Edit: just for clarity, the original comment i replied to said

Lhopital’s rule doesn’t fucking apply when it comes to infinity. Why are so many people in this thread using lhopital’s rule. Yes, it gives us the limit as x approaches infinity but in this case we are comparing the growth rate of two functions that are trying to make infinity go faster, this is not possible. Infinity is infinite, it’s like the elementary school playground argument saying “infinity + 1” there is no “infinity + 1”, it’s just infinity. Infinity is the range of all the numbers ever, you can’t increase that set of numbers that is already infinite.