interolivary

joined 1 year ago
[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

High tariffs and other economic sanctions would essentially be just that, but like another comment said the west isn't ready for it.

We've managed to entangle our economies too deeply with cheap Chinese production, so actually sanctioning them would be painful to say the least and they know it

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Taking a stab in the dark here, but they probably don't like the genocide of Palestinians that the state of Israel is engaged in

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah to expand on this, in professional settings you'll want a higher sampling frequency so you don't end up with eg. aliasing, but for consumer use ≥44–48kHz sampling rate is pretty much pointless

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

Probably the latter. Seems like a cynical marketing ploy, really

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Surprisingly enough, some essential oils do have research-based actual uses, such as topical antibacterials, antifungals and antiparasitics.

While there's quite a bit of woo woo around them, there's also a lot of interesting research into phytochemicals like essential oils. Same with a few other "plant-based" things like pine resin; there's even a clinically tested pine resin salve that helps with wound healing and is used for treating difficult wounds in some hospitals in Finland.

The problem with essential oils is trying to filter out the snake oil claims from the actual research-based claims. Most vendors tend to have pretty, well, wild claims about what their products can do, so your best bet is scholar.google.com or www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and the like

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 1 points 2 months ago

Ahh right yes, gotcha. I misunderstood you and thought you didn't think the statistics were believable because they're so skewed

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

How do you propose these "open source journalists" make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that'd just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who's not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn't worked out too well for most publishers so far.

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 3 points 2 months ago (6 children)

no one ever tactfully includes ads

This is pretty patently hyperbole; I've run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.

Whether it's class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can't just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that'll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I've seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it's not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.

While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher's paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not

 

One thing that pretty consistently drops me out of the flow state is having to dig through documentation for whatever I'm trying to use, or even worse having to dig through its source code because the documentation is either nonexistent or eg. plain wrong

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Why does it seem statistically unlikely? If the assumption is that minorities are somehow being targeted, wouldn't statistics like this be exactly what one would see?

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 9 points 2 months ago

If Trump wins, I figure it's fairly likely that Russia will turn its sights towards attacking one of them smaller NATO members at its borders. Probably not a full-on invasion at least at first, but more of a test of whether Article 5 actually holds water or not – and with Trump in charge of the US, it's unlikely he'd decide to stand up against Russia

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 2 points 2 months ago

Average conservative moment. What's scary is that calling for an ethnic cleansing of leftists isn't a fringe opinion anymore, and people like him are gaining more and more power by the year.

And it's not like this is just the US. Here in Europe, Italy is ruled by a party that is a direct descendant of Mussolini's Fascist Party; Hungary is… well, Hungary; extremist right wing parties are very popular in Germany; Finland's government has multiple literal neo-Nazis in it, with one extremist right-wing party eg. blocking legislation that would help guarantee the impartiality of courts; and the list goes on and on. It's pretty telling that at least here in Finland, the under-25's are much more conservative than Millennials or even Gen X – the majority of them voted for either a "fiscally conservative" party (ie. they've started down the "everything I don't like is woke" path and would be fine with concentration camps for leftists as long as they're privately funded) or an extremist right wing party, which has members who have eg. publicly fantasized about murdering gay people and who stan Breivik

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 2 points 2 months ago

Well, whatever the solution to this problem is, I'm fairly sure "put a blockchain on it" isn't going to be it. Distributed ledgers do potentially have some uses, but using them to carry "proof of humanity" information doesn't make much sense

 
 
 
 
 
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Frank! (beehaw.org)
 
 
 

In today's episode of "weird shit I stumbled onto on the internet", I bring you: nuclear-powered pacemakers.

Some of the earlier pacemakers made in the US, around the 70's, were powered by a very small amount of plutonium. If you've ever heard of the term radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG in relation to eg. satellites, that's what the pacemakers used. The upside of using an RTG was that the device could run for decades without needing to get its power source replaced. The downside is that you now have plutonium sown in to your chest cavity – which actually isn't as bad as it sounds considering the amounts used, but it's still a highly radioactive element and presents some fun challenges, some of which are discussed in the article.

Here's an article on the technical details on how they, and thermoelectric kajiggers in general, work https://blog.plover.com/tech/seebeck-effect.html

 
 
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