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“New Energy Department rules will save consumers $3 billion and cut annual carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over 30 years”

It isn't like insurance where it's a complex product that's easy to get screwed over on... and incandescent lightbulbs are less dangerous and less toxic than compact florescents, which contain mercury, so there's not a safety justification either.

One might imagine taxing them so that they have the same purchase price as LED equivalents if they want to limit incandescent lightbulbs to specialist applications, but they didn't do that, either.

It’s hard to know why LED bulbs die, and apparently in many cases the answer is just “they’re shitty knockoffs”. Which will hopefully get better, but has also been caused partly by the government-mandated abrupt spike in demand.

More interestingly, LEDs tend to get fried in certain fixtures. Sometimes this is easily solvable (enclosed fixtures or their bulbs can be changed), sometimes it’s hard but urgent (your wiring is faulty), other times it’s very much not. If your mains voltage varies or your lightbulb circuits aren’t isolated from large appliances, you can kill LEDs and CFLs extremely fast with spikes in voltage+heat. Incandescents will weather this just fine and merely flicker a bit.

Twitter missed payroll today.

I read the article, and want to highlight something that isn’t the focus of the article but IS deeply important:

The very last paragraph. Provided here as a screenshot for attribution, but here’s the relevant bit if you can’t see it: “Twitter did not respond to a request to comment on this story. It is unclear whether it has any communications staffers still employed after layoffs.”

He cut about $2 Billion in salaries, added $1 Billion in interest payments, and so if "Twitter 2.0" can still sell ads, even $1 Billion FEWER ads, without getting completely screwed by regulators, then Elon effectively spent $31 Billion of his own money on a toy. But a profitable toy.

As you’re saying, ad revenue traces back to users via something like:

$ <- clickthroughs <- impressions <- page loads <- daily users and average visit length

(Plus some adjustment for user wealth, successful ad targeting, and ad price/format.)

That’s why Facebook focused so hard on 1) getting everyone alive with disposable income as a user, and 2) increasing daily usage times as high as possible.

That formula cares whether you’ve got your wallet out, which is why Google ads do so well. It cares whether you’re posting obscene content next to the ads. But it largely doesn’t care whether you’re posting baby pictures or analyzing NATO policy.

But Twitter has more elite/influential attention than any other social media. It’s the site that triggered a court case over whether the President can block people. A Ugandan general just came close to starting a war with a tweet. Activists worldwide use it to coordinate. Leading authors, actors, and scholars get into career-ending pissing matches regularly. “Bluecheck” is a new equivalent to terms like bourgeoisie. And it’s constantly in the news because the people who write the news are obsessive Twitter users.

I saw another post today arguing Twitter has become so important that it should be considered an essential communication utility and maybe nationalized. But... none of that importance seems to actually make Twitter any extra money. $5B in revenue is a lot, but it’s not Ma Bell money. It can’t rely on subscription fees, and the ad revenue tracks social influence only in indirect ways.

A False Belief is just a perception of reality based on available evidence, prior knowledge, and logical reasoning. The most famous example showing how children have yet to aquire it goes like this:

A small child is shown a labeled box of candy. The researcher will ask "what's in the box?", and the child will say "candy". Then the researcher will open the box, and reveal that the box is filled with marbles. The research will ask "what's in the box?" and the child will say "marbles".

Then, the researcher will ask "if I show this box to mommy, what will she think is inside?" And the child will say "marbles", not "candy". When pressed, a child will maintain the reasoning that their mom will expect the candy box to have marbles inside, even though there's no reason to.

"Why would Mommy think there's marbles inside? "Because there is marbles inside!"

Even though all evidence and prior knowledge would point an older person to assuming there's candy inside, and even though that child themselves also made the assumption that there was candy inside, the child cannot conceptualize the idea of their mother operating without the amount of information that they have themselves. They know that there's marbles inside, so how could anyone else expect there to be candy?

"How long do they think like that?" Until they're about 5ish.

"Oh, then how do they figure it out?" Who fucking knows!

classic deflector shields have the advantage of working intuitively a bit like armor–you hit them until they deplete or the shield generator fails, and then you pummel the ship itself. but they can also be adapted as walls/doors/object manipulating devices, which makes them quite narratively appealing.

It deals very heavily with gravitic drives and their potential as weapons and shields, along with the practical consequences of softer-SF tropes like teleportation. As a taste, this page has a nice little author’s note about the difficulty of drawing EM & gravitic shields accurately, and the comic’s science gets much harder as you read deeper than that.

And it comes to basically the same conclusion: with spacetime-warping engines and a good power source, you defeat laser weapons and similar just by redirecting them a bit, or stopping them if you need to protect what’s behind you. Missiles you can shoot down normally (by far the cheapest option), “outrun” by making the path to you longer, or “kill” with steep gravity gradients.

In which case they do use those gravity gradients as weapons. You have to oppose them with your own distortions, which devolves into “who’s got the most engine power”. Except that you can’t shoot through your own shields, and there’s an inverse-square cost to how far away from your engine you push the distortions. So it’s easier to defend, but you can build shield “breachers” out of a small missile projecting a very short-range field (which can in turn be shot down like normal missiles).

One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter’s face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

The combat veteran was hit with bear spray eight times. His experience overseas “was nothing like this,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

But then comes the Internet. To deal with the Internet, we need the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the No Electronic Theft Act, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and perhaps even the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act. As copying costs approach zero, intellectual property rights must approach perfect control. We must strengthen the rights, lengthen the term of the rights, increase the penalties, and make noncommercial illicit copying a crime. We must move outside the traditional realm of copyright altogether to regulate the technology around the copyrighted material. Companies are surrounding their digital materials with digital fences. We must make it a violation of the law to cut those digital fences, even if you do so to make a “fair use” of the material on the other side. We must prohibit the making of things that can be used as fence-cutters—a prospect that worries researchers on encryption. In the long run, we must get rid of the troublesome anonymity of the Internet, requiring each computer to have an individual ID. We must make click-wrap contracts enforceable, even on third parties, even when you cannot read them before clicking—so that you never actually buy the software, music, movies, and e-books you download, merely “license” them for a narrowly defined range of uses. We must create interlocking software and hardware systems that monitor and control the material played on those systems—so that songs can be licensed to particular computers at particular times. Uses that the owners wish to forbid will actually be impossible, whether they are legal or not.

In other words, we must make this technology of the Internet, which was hailed as the great “technology of freedom,” into a technology of control and surveillance. The possibility of individuals circulating costless perfect digital copies requires it. It would be facile (if tempting) to say we must remake the Internet to make it safe for Britney Spears. The “Internet Threat” argument is that we must remake the Net if we want digital creativity—whether in music or software or movies or e-texts. And since the strength of the property rights varies inversely with the cost of copying, costless copying means that the remade Net must approach perfect control, both in its legal regime and its technical architecture.

Still though, holy shit. I didn’t quite appreciate this until I checked a longer history:

We are witnessing something as benign as gardening growing vegetables being turned into a culture war wedge issue. I mean, it makes sense. There’s an inherent urban-rural divide here, it’s seen as “bourgeois“ even though growing vegetables used to be a rural working class thing.

But preventing “normal“ people from buying seeds, saplings, potting soil or fertiliser at Walmart is at best useless. It’s definitely either stupid or incredibly petty. It’s not a sensible policy!

Now of course it’s not a big enough deal to go on the streets and protest about in this day and age, but the anti-protest posts sound like malfunctioning pattern-matching from the gun control debate: Why would any non-cop need to own plants or seeds?

Put that on my headstone.

(As an aside: I agree that the existing “ownership” of gardening is weird. Rural food gardens are bigger and more common but the red tribe promotes farms, urban gardening is more environmentalist-political but tends bourgeois and rare because the existing soil in cities is usually poisonous.)

Like, here’s the NYT in late March with Panic Buying Comes for the Seeds:

I looked online in search of something that my pandemic-addled mind had decided overnight was essential: seeds.

And then Vermont banned big box retailers from selling non-essential goods (including home & garden supplies) even though they’re open, with an order that also specifically closed gardening sections of home improvement stores. Which I think is how gardening in particular became a flashpoint, and why the-grey-tribe references “buying seeds at Walmart”.

Obviously the rationale was to decrease shopping frequency and make those stores less crowded, but it’s also understandable why “you’re already here for food but can’t put a packet of seeds in your cart” strikes people as highly invasive for little benefit. Even personally, I know several (blue-ish tribe) people who started gardens in response to this, and some of them are really annoyed about gardening restrictions on the grounds that what they’re planting will be ready soon enough to let them shop for food less often.

Which means “breaking quarantine to get non-essential services is red tribe” is either question-begging or a loaded description. The people focusing on gardening are saying it’s a disproportionate or unproductive restriction, and for them the valence is “blindly banning low-risk, independence-promoting activities is (statist) blue tribe”.

1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality

2. Advertising incentivizes churning out shit people don’t want or need.

3. There is a clear inverse relationship between effort and money coming in once an initial hurdle is crossed.

It’s pretty much inevitable that this idea arises with how the systems are set up.

See I’ve never read Animorphs so the question dissolves into the more general “are you a monsterfucker?”

They look like this:

Source: http://andalitetruth.org/

I know Warren Ellis has gotten sick of people telling him “Donald Trump is just like Transmetropolitan!”, but it’s still pretty fitting. (Except that half the critics have it exactly backwards, Trump matches The Beast and not The Smiler.) But I’ve been thinking he came even closer to the mark with Crooked Little Vein, which managed to cover Trump, Epstein, and a lot else besides.