sylver_dragon

The few imitation meat products I have tried have been ok, I guess. Impossible burgers aren’t terrible and I could probably make do with them, if meat were removed from the market completely. I have yet to taste any non-pork bacon which didn’t taste bad (meat or no meat). And I doubt I’m going to find anything to replace a good rack of pork ribs. Really, the best place I’ve found for imitation meats is in dishes where ground meat is used as a protein and is so heavily spiced that you’d have a hard time identifying the type of meat anyway. Once the flavors are all mixed up, the meat is mostly about protein and texture.

Lab grown meat could be a complete game changer, if it’s ever more than a novelty product. A lab grown hamburger, which costs significantly more than one sourced from a cow isn’t it. Sure, you might get a bunch of rich, privileged yuppies eating them, just to show off their smug superiority. It will never have mass market appeal. I do think we’re seeing some interesting advancement in higher end meats though. Lab grown steaks seem like a place where the cost could be competitive and, if they are close enough to, or indistinguishable from cow sourced steaks, then that would be great. I’d be perfectly happy to slap a lab grown rib eye on the grill. I’m not squeamish about raw meat or it’s sourcing from dead animals, but I do recognize the impact that ranching has on the environment and that needs to be reduced.

Overall, I see lab grown meat as a net positive, assuming the costs can be brought in line with other options. This may require subsidies or taxes to skew the market in that direction. But, the government using its power to deal with large, complex problem is kinda the point of government. Stopping more climate change isn’t profitable in a way which will favor it in the market, but it does have a negative impact on society. So, the only real solution is going to be government action to reduce the harm, before the tragedy of the commons comes for us all. Lab grown meat can be one part of a broader solution. And hey, if it means more rib eye, without all the climate harm those bring to the table, that’s fantastic. Though, I’d probably still keep lab grown red meat to a sometimes food, just for health reasons.

The three top competitors of the US, two of which are under heavy sanctions by the US, and the other one has been the target of a trade war, are conspiring against the US? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you. Well, not that shocked. If only there was an area of the world where the US could be using its massive military resources to directly bleed one of those competitors and indirectly bleed a second, just by transferring material to a country which wants closer trade and relations with the US.

While the upper management is a bag of syphilitic dicks, the CDC’s site for this is really nice (for now):
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#maps_positivity-week

Tesla just needs to update it’s logo to better represent it’s leadership:

Ya, they kinda should be. While I don’t like Youngkin one bit, he was pretty well calibrated to run as a Republican in Virginia at the time he ran. He was elected in late 2021, and people were pretty unhappy with the situation around COVID at that point. And much of that blame was piling up on Democrats (read: Biden Administration). Virginia was not some solid blue state. With a heavy military and FedGov presence, there is a lot of pull towards the GOP politically. And Youngkin was reasonably charismatic and appealed well to the GOP base in Virginia. Also, the Democrats had gone out of their way to find as bland of a candidate as possible. Sure, there was nothing major wrong with McAuliffe, but you really don’t want your campaign slogan to be “meh, he’s ok”.

Earle-Sears is basically the wrong candidate at the wrong time for the GOP. She’s done little to nothing to distance herself from Trump, and that brand is not doing well in a lot of Virginia. Even in the Southwest, which is redder than a baboon’s ass, Trumpism has been showing cracks. Earle-Sears’s has also not been doing a lot to promote herself, hiding out from journalists and avoiding debates. She’s just not the charismatic, “independent conservative” which Youngkin built a campaign message around. By contrast Spanberger is pretty close to the center of politics in Virginia. She’s basically a centrist Democrat who has been out pushing a left of center economic message. She’s also former CIA, which I think helps on the balance in Virginia (again, big Military and FedGov presence). She won’t win any sort of popularity contest on Lemmy, but the candidates Lemmy would like aren’t going to win in Virginia at the moment.

There used to be readable how-tos and tutorials for things, and now all that’s left is 45 minute YT videos littered with influencer garbage.

This is so much of what I hate about the internet today. Many, many things which should be a single page wall of text is now some 20 minute video which just shows the person doing something, with terrible music in the background and fuck-all for deep explanations. I do understand how hard it is to write those deep explanations, my own blog has gone over a year without an update. But fuck, if you’re the type of person who can be constantly working and posting, this seems like something that should be reasonable to do. Of course, monetizing the written word is harder. I know some writers are getting there on substack,. but that seems like a platform where you need to have an audience first and then you can monetize it. There isn’t really any discoverability in substack. If people don’t know you’re there, they won’t find you.

Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme with a really long time horizon. In a way, any fiat currency kinda is as well. The difference is that a government backed fiat currency like the US Dollar is backed by the US Government saying “you will accept the USD, or else”. That backing keeps the game running. Bitcoin has nothing like that. The only reason it keeps going is because of speculation, money laundering and the purchase of black market goods.

So, as long as you can go buy drugs or move money across borders with Bitcoin, it will have value. As long as it has value, some folks will speculate on it. That can keep prices up, right up until it doesn’t. So, as is always the case for speculative assets, caveat emptor.

I happen to be a prime example of how bad US Rail is this week. I’m taking my son from near Fredericksburg (the real one), up to Ballston for a summer camp. We have a couple options:

1. Drive

• Distance: ~70 miles one way, ~140 round trip
• Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, with traffic. ~3.5 hours round trip.
• Cost:
  • 4 gallons (US) of gas @ $3.50/gal: $14
  • Wear and tear: estimate at 0.5 gas cost: $7
  • Parking: $11
  • Total: $32/day

2. Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Washington Area Metro (WMATA)

• Distance: N/A
• Time:
  • Drive to Fredericksburg station: 20 minutes
  • VRE (Fredericksburg to L’Enfant station) - 1 hour 20 minutes
  • WMATA (L’Enfant to Ballston) - 20 minutes
  • Total: 2 hours one way, 4 hours round trip
• Cost:
  • Drive: we’ll just ignore this, it’s close enough to zero.
  • VRE: $23.56/person * 2 people: $47.12
  • WMATA: $3.45/person * 2 people: $6.90
  • Total: $54.02/day

So, for the low, low cost of about 1.68 times the cost of driving, we can take slightly longer to get to our destination and have zero control over our schedule, which makes the actual time devoted to travel considerably longer. We tried the public transit route last year, and it meant leaving earlier in the morning (about 30 minutes) to catch a train to get us there on time, and getting us home around 45 minutes later. And this is right around the US Capitol, which has some of the better transit options. Needless to say, we’re driving this year.

I really want to be able to take transit, but it’s basically dead in the US. Earlier this year, I needed to go to Boston for work. Catching a train from Washington, DC to Boston meant an 7 hour train ride (using the “high speed” Acela line) at ~$500 round trip. Flying was 1.5 hours and cost ~$300 round trip. Wanna guess which option I used?

Basically, all of the incentives are stacked against transit options in the US. Except within certain metro areas, driving or flying is always cheaper and faster. Yes, inside those metro areas, public transit can be great. I used to work in Washington, DC and used the VRE I mentioned earlier to get there and then WMATA or the Capital BikeShare to get to my office. That was great, since I didn’t have to drive into DC every day, which sucks big donkey balls. But it probably wasn’t cost effective and wasn’t really time efficient either.

War is Peace. Freedom is slavery.
And now for your Five Minute Hate.

Not a specific word or phrase, but Google Dorking is useful for limiting down search results. Just the basics of putting things in double quotes (e.g. “Find this exact text”) and negating words/phrases (e.g. -NotThis) can go a long way in refining search results. The “filetype:” modifier is much less useful than it was a decade or two ago, as SEO assholes have gotten wise to it and so include tags to show up on results using it. The “site:” keyword can be really handy, when you are pretty sure what you want is on a specific site/domain. Or, if you are trawling a website for specific information. You can also negate the “site:” keyword. So, you can add something like “-site:expertsexchange.com” to a search and get rid of useless advertising sites.

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it.

I’m willing to withhold judgement. But, Chosen’s website reads like bog standard vulture capital trying to pretend they are not going to ride in and enshitify anything they touch. With lots of broad claims about being “community driven” and AI art. Maybe this will work out; but, I wouldn’t be putting money on it.

That said, I don’t blame Dark0ne for wanting to step back. He’s be running this wonderful site for the community for a long time and deserves the opportunity to go do other things. I wish him the best of luck and I hope that NexusMods survives this transition.

It seems that internal polling put the “weird” message as not really helping (or hurting) the Harris campaign. Arguably, keeping up the “weird” message may have been useful, but they were likely trying to find something that seemed to have a larger impact.

The short answer is, it’s what we were taught in school. Like many preferences, it’s shaped by the culture we grow up and live in.

I’m sorry but it doesn’t make sense to me.

Of course not, you were raised and live in a different culture; so, your preferences are different.

Ultimately, the right answer is ISO8601. It’s unambiguous and sorts well on computers. But, I don’t think any culture is teaching that as the primary way to write dates, so we’re stuck with the crappy ways.

Crypto is a ponzi scheme playacting at being a currency or investment vehicle. Meme coins just dispense with playacting and aim for shorter time horizons on cashing out from the ponzi scheme.

The person who authored the cheat(s) the other person is using. Because clearly, if I lost they must be cheating. /s

For many games, I’d argue that you are to blame for your loss. Assuming the game is based purely on skill, then your ability to execute said skills is the only factor which matters. Consider something like Chess, where the game is solved and one’s ability to win is really down to your ability to memorize board positions and recognize the optimal move. If you lose, it’s likely because you failed to pick the optimal path.

This is mitigated, to a greater or lesser extent in games where chance plays some role. It’s entirely possible to chose an optimal path, but have RNGesus decide that you get to lose today. Some games provide some ability to manage the risks created by randomness, but you often have some reliance on “luck”. Obviously, the more luck dependent a game is, the less control you have over winning/losing.

And then there is the issue of other players who can affect the outcome. If you play a game where there are more than two players, the other players may be able to change the course of the game enough that, no matter how well optimized your choices, you cannot win. This leads to the classic “kingmaker” problem in board games. It may be that someone who is themselves unable to win is in a position to directly effect the outcome of the game in such a way as to make another player win or lose. So, maybe you played a very good game, but the kingmaker decides that you lose.

Ultimately, the answer to the original question is, “it depends”. And there are a lot of factors one must look at to come to an answer. And that answer is unlikely to be whole one thing or the other.

It’s a matter of circumstance. Authoritarianism is only useful in situations where time pressures make the slow, deliberate decisions of democracy unworkable. Combat is a good example of this. When the shells are raining down around you, there isn’t really time to hold a vote on how to proceed. So, in such situations there is usually a chain of command which is given authoritarian control. Other emergent situations will also often require similar levels of top-down control. The person in charge may not make the best or fairest decisions in the heat of the moment. But, inaction will almost certainly be a worse choice.

The other side of this is, when the situation isn’t emergent, a democratic (well, really semi-democratic, but I’m going to use “democratic”) system is likely the best choice. And those democratic systems would be wise to prepare for the emergent situations by identifying and designating the people who will be handed dictatorial control when the fecal matter hits the air circulator. And the system for identifying when the emergency has ended, how dictatorial power is unwound and how the performance of the person handed that power is to be judged.

The reason I hedged with “semi-democratic” is that a truly democratic system can have issues too. The classic “tyranny of the majority” problem. As any majority could override the rights of a minority in a truly horrible fashion. The solution being things like constitutional democracies, where the power of the majority is limited in specific ways (e.g. unrevokable rights).

That is really rich coming from the person who wrote the decision making the President unaccountable to the Rule of Law.

The entertaining question would be: what do the salaries of the new employees look like, compared to the old ones? I’d suspect that the administration is thinking they can fire a well experienced, but expensive employee and hire on a cheap replacement. However, I also suspect many of those positions are fairly specialized and they are going to end up paying to get rid of all that experience and then end up paying a premiums to hire someone with the needed experience for the position.

I’ve not returned an item over it, but I’ve often wondered if there was a market for a company which de-LEDs items.