He is one of the best documented historical figures ever

If that were true then this thread would be full of people providing citations to that excellent documentation, but you will notice a complete absence of that here.

The closest we’ve come in this thread is the Wikipedia page with citations to several historians saying “yeah we mostly think he was probably real based on it would be weird if he wasn’t”

That is a waaaay lower level of certainty than you’re presenting here.

It is extremely disputed that he was a real person.

Mostly tradies are learning by hands-on apprenticeship with a master. All that discussion is not on the internet.

Rephrased, “it’s not just fixing things that is my job. It’s also important that nobody else besides me can fix the things.”

My vet told me some dogs ate sensitive to grapes and some dogs can have as much as they want without harm and you only find out which way it is for your dog by watching them die of kidney failure

I drive a giant motor home with headlights about five feet lower than my eye level.

Other cars’ reflectors work fine.

Sometimes it’s hard to read reflective signs above way over the highway, but retroreflective stuff at road level is definitely working

Yes, those count as technical skills and there are many, many people for whom it’s too big a hurdle.

picking out a decent micro PC that actually works is hard.

Getting a pc install (presumably windows) configured in a way that will display in the TV legibly from the couch is hard.

Requiring a keyboard and mouse to use your TV from the couch is weird and off-putting. Most people won’t want to and some people will have difficulty understanding what they’re supposed to do with these objects

The technical competence bar for getting a TV plugged in and working is just ridiculously, ridiculously low, and that’s for a reason

It does not — dumb people have the same access to the better drugs as smart people.

A eugenics-driven society where dumb people are left to die and smart people get extra health care likely would be effective at breeding children who are better at passing the “smart people” test, but I would not like to live in a society like that.

If you’re about to argue that having enough money to pay for health care correlates with intelligence… I would welcome some evidence. I used to think that was obvious but, having grown up and experienced the world some, the only thing I see that correlates with intelligence is depression.

What are tech companies going to do when customers go an increasing amount of years between purchases?

Ignore them and continue selling almost exclusively to businesses and manufacturers?

If they do the density right, then rents should come down not go up. More places built to live and have shops means (assuming there is demand fill them, which there certainly seems to be) we should have cheaper rents for each space AND more total revenue for all the landlords AND more variety in nearby shops for all the people living there.

The problem in Seattle is exactly that they are fucking NOT increasing the density of housing and especially of street-level commercial, not nearly fast enough to keep up with all the people moving there.

Lots of talk, more action needed.

That sounds lovely. I wish our planners did it that way.

those jobs just pivoted

How many car jobs are there now compared to however many horse jobs there used to be?

I feel like it’s many many fewer jobs, and the horse jobs did more of a disappearance than a pivot. But I don’t know it.

Does anyone here have data?

Motherfucker I am still humming a jingle sometimes for a tooth powder ad for a company that went out of business before I was born, because my mother used to randomly sing it around the house when I was small.

That shit is pernicious.

Congratulations on your finely-developed ability to filter which of your perceptions advance to memory but I will pick up and remember just any random thing and it sticks

I already could never ignore that shit, that’s why I’m so thorough and motivated about scrubbing ads from my life.

This was an awesome read, thank you

Yes. Chinese manufacturers are using sodium batteries in some low-range cheap city-cars, too. But fundamentally there is less energy storage in a charged sodium atom than a charged lithium atom so it seems sodium batteries must always be bigger and heavier than equivalent-capacity lithium batteries.

Cost, yes, energy density, very much no.

The Internet told me the appendix absolutely has a function:

If you get sick and shit the absolute fuck out of everything in your bowels — full colon cleanse the hard way — your appendix holds back a colony of your intestinal support bacteria which serves as a base to recolonize your gut.

This is extremely useful to anyone who lives in a world where illnesses of intense gut-cleansing shitting are a thing.

No it’s not, at least not according to Wikipedia.

Epstein-Barr virus is a different herpes virus that causes mono, which is not the same as HSV1 with its cold sores

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein–Barr_virus

Canva surely would become assholes if they had a monopoly, but it’s a loooooong way from “gaining some market traction” to “Adobe is defeated and powerless to compete”