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admiralteal

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admiralteal , to technology in All EFF’d Up | Yasha Levine

I never really thought about them defending that bullshit, but that's worthy of heavy criticism.

Any time you find yourself on the same side of an issue as the Cato Institute, you should think real long and hard about your position.

admiralteal , to technology in Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather, study finds

Very good induction cooktops are nowhere near $1,000 per hob and can boil water in a fraction the time as gas. Don't buy the Frigidaire crapola and the stating price for a very good full induction convection range with 4-5 hobs is ~$1,250. Spend twice that and you'll have a machine with no downsides.

admiralteal , to technology in Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather, study finds

Really, the only thing you can't do on an electric range that you can do on a typical gas cooker is, for example, directly fire a pepper.

And you really don't need to do that. You can just do it under the broiler, for example. I also don't even insist on induction. A mid-range radiant top is STILL better than gas, in my opinion, though the induction is worth it if you can afford it.

People will bring up woks a lot, but a gas range also can't draw out the real advantages of a wok and you're better off with an outdoor chimney cooker or a dedicated wok burner (induction with a small torch or gas bottle) if that's what you really care about.

Plus, I must again point out how fucking AWFUL it is to clean a gas cooktop compared to how trivially easy it is to clean a glass-top electric cooker. The time saved cleaning more than makes up for the advantages people list with gas even if we grant those advantages exist. Which I clearly don't.

admiralteal , to technology in All EFF’d Up | Yasha Levine

The EFF believes every slope is very, very, very slippery indeed.

Many of them aren't that slippery. Cleaving absolutely to a hard rule is just walking away from the hard work of good governance. I wish they'd focus way more on privacy and competitive goals like adversarial interoperability and a lot less on speech because they often have an approach to speech that makes me a little gag-y.

It's funny, because the first time I heard an academic type seriously talking critically about the idea of free speech being an unfettered and absolute right was on the EFF's own podcast. Pointing out that we as a society have all kinds of very real limits on speech that nearly no one thinks of as at all controversial (e.g., anti-defamation rules, sexual harassment bans, or all kinds of conspiracy/incitement statues). Yet they then come and make statements like they did about the KiwiFarms case where the threat they believe in is just so overstated.

I think it's a lot rarer for the ACLU to have me raising my eyebrows. To me, they feel a lot more steadfast and predictable. The ACLU will defend a LOT of genuine criminals, but they do so because we factually live in a police state propped up by repeated anti-civil rights SCOTUS opinions. They do so because the outcomes of those cases WILL affect innocent people in a straight line -- the police WILL take every opportunity to violate you without a second thought even if it ISN'T allowed, and will do so with gusto when it is. I don't think there is a similar straight line with a Tier 1 ISP killing traffic to a known hate site that regularly threatens and incites violence against specific people.

admiralteal , to news in "Write a Check for $11,000. She Was 26, She Had Limited Value." [Seattle Police] Officer Jokes with Police Union Leader About Killing of Pedestrian by Fellow Cop

Why do cops have the power to just routinely turn off their body cams?

That should be limited to using the bathroom. If it gets turned off during regular duty, it should be presumed to mean something is being covered up because that is exactly what it means. There should be paperwork triggered every time it is turned off.

admiralteal , to technology in Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather, study finds

Even modern radiant electric boils water faster (pretty typical for even a pretty low-end electric top to have a 3500-5000W quick boil burner). And induction or a kettle both do it a near order of magnitude faster. Not to mention none of them hugely heat up the room or require a superpower ventilator that sucks out your conditioned air. If boiling water fast is the task you care about, gas is almost certainly the worst choice. At least for home use.

Commercial kitchens are a different story that isn't even part of the discussion. Even with three-phase power, to run an all-electric mid size-large commercial kitchen would likely require some crazy service level that wouldn't be available in many places. It'll be a while before that is an option.

admiralteal , to technology in Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather, study finds

Counterpoint: electrifying homes is also a huge cost savings in general once you are at the point where you're willing to forgo that big gas furnace in favor of an efficient heat pump system.

Cookers use very little gas. It's really only water heaters and furnaces that use a lot of it, and heat pump units are incredibly efficient for both those tasks. Though I will admit that the noise a heat pump water heater makes is just atrocious and you'll need to figure out if your can manage that in your life (e.g., by setting it to only run at night, when you're out of the house, or putting it somewhere far away from where you spend time).

Keeping a gas hookup at $15+/month for a single appliance like a water heater or range is an expense a lot of people can and should trim, but instead they treat it like a sunk cost and think "well I have this one appliance, so I may as well get MORE gas appliances". Which is intended. The whole "now you're cooking with gas" campaign and all the nonsense ad campaigns about how gas ranges cook better than electric* was a deliberate (astroturf) marketing campaign from natural gas utilities because they knew that keeping electric cookers in the house would stop people from abandoning the appliances that ACTUALLY use gas but were hard to get people passionate about. This isn't a conspiracy theory; we have the memos and POs.

  • the difference is at best unnoticeable to the average cook and I truly believe the performance is worse, especially when factoring in time spent cleaning. Electric ovens are flatly better and modern electric cook tops work super well, even if not induction.
admiralteal , to news in Judge who signed off on raid of Kansas newspaper is facing a complaint about the decision

The penalty for searching without a warrant is that evidence acquired is inadmissible. Sometimes. Sometimes not even that. Typically, that's fucking it. So it doesn't really matter that the search was illegal once the property is returned. Mostly, the penalties for the police are just political ones.

If there are some provable damages, the person who's civil rights were damaged might be able to sue, though with qualified immunity even that is a very, very uphill battle. SCOTUS rules against plaintiffs in cases like that routinely because the SCOTUS is very, very pro-police. They routinely rule that making things harder for the police & prosecutors is too high a price to pay for protecting civil rights. See, for example, Van Buren vs US or Arizona v. Gant.

admiralteal , to nottheonion in Police Narcan pitbull puppy O.D.ing on Fentanyl in Walmart parking lot

Man, it would be great if highly-potent fentanyl that could be administered by just skin contact were available to addicts. Think of how many public health problems disappear by eliminating the need to inject. Not to mention you should be able to get very consistent dosing by just counting patches.

There are fentanyl formulations for patch administration, but they have WAY less potency and are quite niche in application. Not something that has recreational application.

I don't know of any drug that makes drug enforcement police less cowardly, though.

admiralteal , to news in California lawmakers vote to fast-track low-income housing on churches’ lands

I couldn't live in the country. Too inconvenient with too few upsides. I've spent years in New Hampshire 35 minutes on the highway from everything (meaning a kmart and a massive Hannaford store and nearly zero locally run businesses) and it was awful. I hate every single trip needing to be a planned special occasion.

My city is an under 3 story mix of single and multifamily homes with a loose grid and a lot to do. A handful of medium sized buildings in a walkable downtown. Dead silent at night, busy in the dayz always somewhere open to grab something when late at night. That's my view of a proper place to live. But property values are going insane and the exurbs are growing fast and bringing with them traffic congestion and stupid politics, so I know I'll need to fight to keep it a great place in the future.

admiralteal , to news in California lawmakers vote to fast-track low-income housing on churches’ lands

Never underestimate how much of the current crisis is caused by people who think or thought they were doing good. Prejudiced idiots with good intentions is the chorus in the song of history and something we must always be cautious not to fall into ourselves.

A lot of the people responsible for driving the "suburban experiment" in the 50s/60s would've self-identified as science-minded progressive urbanists in their day. They weren't, but they probably genuinely thought they were. It was easy enough to not realize how awful their "science" was, how brutally regressive the policies were (especially for how they affected poor and vulnerable populations). They didn't understand the environmental catastrophe it represented or the financial timebomb it set ticking. They thought they were building better cities for a brighter tomorrow that would benefit everyone.

Just because the effect was "I got mine, fuck you" does not mean that was the goal. A lot of these people didn't even consider the downsides of these policies because there were vanishingly few major voices challenging them. Yeah, there was also a lot of capital interest involved and undeniably a lot of legitimate conspiracy (especially re: trolleycar destruction), along with a VERY stateist postwar news media that give us a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but the reality is that the zeitgeist was pretty seriously bought in.

That's a big reason organizations like Strong Towns push so hard to try and upend the current development pattern -- return cities to slower, organic, community-driven growth instead of large top-down projects. It's because we often have terrible missteps when we jump in and start wildly building all the new hotnesses.

admiralteal , to news in California lawmakers vote to fast-track low-income housing on churches’ lands

Absolutely. And if the state were offering that safety net earnestly there would be no need for anyone like the church to offer it today. But when the church stopped being the public safety net, the bottom end of housing significantly just dropped out.

We had the idiotic belief that everyone would be living in the suburbs with a two-car garage so we built our society around the idea that very little else needed to exist other than detached single-family homes in the suburbs with a two-car garage.

I'd much rather see serious pushes towards legitimate public/social housing rather than empowering third parties with their own goals and motivations to supply the thing we need. But at the moment I'll take whatever we can get.

admiralteal , to news in California lawmakers vote to fast-track low-income housing on churches’ lands

Church housing used to be a part of the service that "missing middle" represents. Not literally stuff in the middle, but housing products that are largely not allowed anymore. They used to supply at the lower end that we now have to rely on extremely inefficient institutions like shelters to do.

All housing that gets built is good for the housing crisis. But what's particularly good is building housing at Market slices where there is currently nothing.

admiralteal , to technology in Google’s new Topics API makes users vulnerable to fingerprinting attacks

I suspect the list of people who switched to Chrome from Firefox, especially within the last decade, is vanishingly small.

In the early days of Chrome, it was svelt and lightweight compared to Opera or Firefox, but IE had the vast, vast, vast market share. Chrome handled tabs in a really cool way (the way ALL browsers now do it, putting them right in the application title bar in place of menus). The light touch and nice tabs made it worthwhile to switch at the time. And frankly, Blink was better than Gecko. But even then, the goal of all of the browser wars was to get people off of IE. IE didn't respect web standards and made it flat-out hard to build websites. Switching someone to Chrome from IE was super easy so many people were encouraged to do so.

For most of its life, people were switching from IE (and Safari) to Chrome. Not Firefox to Chrome.

Nowadays, Chrome is just everywhere. People know it, and it still has a fairly-undeserved reputation as being better than the default browser (Edge/Safari).

So the reason this feels so illogical to you is because that scenario just... wasn't happening.

admiralteal , to technology in YouTube is going to remove ad controls for creators

Enshitification

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