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swansont

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Everything posted by swansont

  1. And apartments are relatively cheap, since you have neighbors and a corridor, so you’re basically not losing heat to anyone adjoining you.
  2. I researched this recently following a claim that housing costs are no less affordable than they were the past couple of generations, and while costs have risen it’s largely due to the size of new houses going up. Avg size of 1500 sq ft in in 1970 vs ~2500 square feet 40-50 years later
  3. Thanks; unfortunately the “reporting” gives nothing in terms of actual detail. The bill tripled, but nothing about why. Did the rates change? Did the usage go up? Was it something administrative thing? (there are programs that “smooth out” your bills so you don’t pay so much in the high-use months - did that end, and the whole thing come due?) Unfortunately it looks like it could be using an outlier and presenting it as typical, which is an intellectually dishonest tactic.
  4. In upstate NY, my base rate for electricity is about $0.17 per kwh. With taxes and other charges it comes to about $0.25 per kwh I use less than 1000 kwh per month; that’s highest in winter when I use a space heater in one room that’s colder.
  5. Highly dependent on their circumstances. Do they say where they are, how big the house is, and what the electricity is being used for (e.g. do they have electric heat) and how many kwh? Article is paywalled.
  6. Moderator NoteRules require the information be posted here. A video link is insufficient
  7. No matter how many times you divide by 2, you will never reach 0 Do you have any numerical example of applying this to an actual, physical situation, such that it can be tested?
  8. You can tell the direction that the high energy particles are coming from. Not the sun.
  9. Most of the episode summaries on IMDB tell you where they are and how old the meteorites are. There’s probably information about how they know the age and more details if you search on the name of each meteorite field.
  10. They’ve announced that all Americans should leave. Something that the WH brain trust was unable to anticipate a week ago. It’s almost like there was no plan, and that the people in charge are incompetent </sarcasm>
  11. swansont replied to DrmDoc's topic in The Lounge
    I’m less inclined to attribute this as a fault in an era where they simply didn’t know much (in this case, about atoms, nuclear structure and isotopes) - there was no valid existing theory behind most of what they were investigating. We know now you can change lead into gold but it’s not a chemical reaction and that you’d need a particle accelerator TIL they actually did it at the LHC https://home.cern/news/news/physics/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01501-5
  12. Uplift and erosion exposes older sediments, so it’s not necessarily the case that the surface layer is young. Where were they doing this?
  13. He took a similar approach with deportations. Sure, they might have been showing up for check-ins and following rules for asylum, but they were painted as bad people and that was what they focused on - a distraction from violating due process. Then it gets somewhat normalized. Now they’re shooting/murdering people, and lying about the circumstances Focusing on Maduro is a distraction from the violation of UN agreements and the US Constitution. But the lies continue, since that’s what they do.
  14. I think it’s a good point to include poison in the discussion, because drugs are potential poisons, we just use them in nonlethal doses. Botox would be an example that clearly shows this. It’s the botulinum toxin, perhaps the deadliest natural substance we’ve discovered (nanograms per kg of target is a lethal dose if injected) but sufficiently diluted it’s used as a treatment for certain afflictions. It’s a matter of what it does, and whether that helps with some medical issue if you use the right dose and delivery method (injection vs inhalation vs oral intake generally have different lethal doses)
  15. One aspect of people who prefer a simple explanation that’s wrong rather than a complex answer that’s right, especially in cases when it aligns with their worldview.
  16. Alternatively, you could just not use AI. Especially the one that’s a kiddie/nonconsensual porn generator.
  17. How do you assess if you are making progress? It can’t think.
  18. Friends of mine used to live in Crystal City, VA, which had apartments, shopping at the ground level and a metrorail stop. But most areas in northern Virginia built out, not up. A lot of one- and two-story malls. I was lucky to have lived in a complex a short distance away from one so I could walk to do shopping if I wanted/needed to (but was obviously limited to what I could carry) but most of the residential area wasn’t close enough.
  19. Discussions of Grok or any AI are OT, but if you have the impression that it’s thinking (“we THINK”) you are too far down the rabbit hole. No, that’s not entanglement, which is a particular correlation that undetermined states will have when they are measured. “now” is not a well-defined term in physics. You’d need to test that hypothesis, but I think we’d have already noticed the correlation between solar flares and getting bombarded by high-energy particles here on earth, rather than solar magnetic activity like sunspots.
  20. And temperature in kinetic theory is the center-of-mass kinetic energy. When QM is incorporated it shows up as a fraction of atoms in excited states, so at absolute zero everything is in the ground state AFAIK, it’s not clear that the energy isn’t zero. Gravitational potential energy is negative. Some interactions have infinite range, so I don’t see how you get there. The interactions may be quite small, but electromagnetic and gravitational effects don’t actually cease. How would an “overall” system get to zero but a subsystem doesn’t? Temperature in any equilibrium state is positive. I don’t think we have any evidence that models would fail It’s not nonsensical to ask - that leads to discussion of what’s happening. (it would be like asking if lacking knowledge/not understanding something is nonsensical; of course not. Everybody has things they don’t know or understand) It’s asserting things that can be.
  21. No. That’s a reasonably accurate pop-sci description; the electron is nominally a point particle and if you detect it, it is localized. But as you know, the actual science is more nuanced than popular, qualitative descriptions.
  22. Motion is always with respect to something else; it doesn’t require an interaction. Having no motion isn’t possible, since absolute zero isn’t attainable Electrons “in orbit” aren’t moving; they have no trajectory. This is the domain of quantum mechanics. Electrons are not in classical, planetary orbits
  23. Yes, but in SN 1987a it was ~3 hours and that was 168,000 LY away. The timing discrepancy is irrelevant to the point I was making; you can’t argue the the neutrino burst was part of some “continuous existence” which seems to be part of the erroneous argument/misunderstanding here
  24. (for those unfamiliar: Costco is a chain of warehouse-style store, selling lots of varied things including groceries, electronics, appliances and furniture) “A first-of-its-kind Costco with 800 apartment units above it is coming to Baldwin Hills, a neighborhood in South Los Angeles that Census Reporter finds has a poverty rate 25% higher than the national average.” https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/hundreds-of-apartments-are-being-built-on-top-of-a-costco/485190 In the US, commercial property is generally separated from residential (at least in spread-out areas), owing to zoning laws, and it’s been this way for a while - anything built in the last 75-100 years in many places. I think in older, high-density cities (e.g. northeast, like NYC and Boston) you still have places with residential-above-commercial, but not so much in western cities that expanded more recently. So this is kind of a big deal to waking up to the housing situation and struggles of lower-income people who lack personal transportation. And smart for Costco, because pretty much all of the residents are going to shop there

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