Beegenerates. 😆 Beelinquents. Cowbees? (I’m joking here, but that’s actually kinda not bad.)

I’ll bee here all week.

That’s the only way to offer free services?! What about donation-based models? Maybe Mozilla could have set up something like what Brave has, except not based around a sketchy cryptocurrency.

Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I thought Brave only gave donatable tokens to users as a reward for watching ads… ads which Brave curated for the user based on their activity. It’s just targeted ad revenue with extra steps.

At first blush, it seems to me that both Brave and Anonym want to be the middleman for targeted advertising. What am I missing?

Makeover day!

I admitted to some of my friends that I’d love the chance to get some makeup tips from them, and they pounced on that with unexpected enthusiasm. They scheduled an appointment at the mall, saying it was a rite of passage. So I got my makeup done by a professional makeup artist who taught me how to do things like foundation matching and mixing color changer, all while a gaggle of absolutely wonderful people took notes and told me I looked beautiful.

I’ve been running on that high for weeks now.

I’d argue your SO might not be displaying neurotypical behavior.

Between 50-85% of autistic spectrum people (plus a significant portion of people with PTSD or depression) experience Alexithymia, or significant difficulty in recognizing and analyzing their emotional state.

When I’m feeling bad, my SO frequently assumes I’m withholding the reason from him in some sort of passive-aggressive mindgame, and I have to remind him that I barely know what my mood is, let alone what’s causing it.

I’m getting better at it, but it’s a lot of work and I still regularly mistake stomachaches for anxiety.

When a smaller nation aligns itself with a larger empire or coalition, it will gravitate towards that collective’s philosophy. Sometime’s it’s imposed through political or military pressure, or “encouraged” through subversion, but it can just as easily happen through the natural influence of a larger and more prolific culture.

Historically, there have been more socialist and/or communist states associated with the USSR than not. Especially when measured by population.

2-3°C is the worst case if we stick to existing policy. If we flinch or back down on those policies, then the sky’s the limit.

Youtube videos often gloss over the details for the sake of uninhibited futurism.

Large-scale hydrogen electrolysis has a cost of around 55kWh/kg, and when you combust the H2 directly you get about 39kWh/kg back. Without compression/transport, using H2 as a heating fuel is 71% efficient.

H2 is usually compressed for transport. Compression of 1 kg of H2 to 700 bar costs about 5kWh of additional electricity. I’ll spare you the calcs, but truck transport is under 1kWh/kg H2. This reduces our efficiency to 39kWh/61kWh or 64%.

Converting H2 to ammonia takes the place of the compressor and truck. 2 mols of ammonia burn for 162kcal, less than the 204kcal you’d get from 3 mols of H2. The Haber-Bosch process reduces output to 31kWh per kg of H2 put in. This reduces out efficiency to 31kWh/55kWh or 56%.

With currently-proven cracking technology, it costs around 23kcal/mol of ammonia, reducing overall efficiency to about 55%. It is more effective to burn ammonia directly than to convert it into H2 and burn the H2.

Using ammonia as a transport medium removes a bunch of technical problems, but it introduces new ones. It’s corrosive, it’s toxic, it burns eyes/lungs/skin, and it wastes more energy than you’d think.

There are quite a few comanies now that follow some version of “name-blind hiring,” where the system scrubs the name from the resume before the interviewer sees it, for the sake of avoiding biases. These companies would be a good place to start.

Outside of name-blind hiring, a lot of people use nicknames or given names on resumes, particularly if they have non-english names that could tempt biases or be hard to pronounce. It is widespread and completely kosher as long as HR has your current legal name for your background check and W-2.

No matter what, HR will need your legal name. But in my experience, HR departments tend to be accepting and accustomed to maintaining confidentiality. And they don’t make the hiring decisions, anyway.

Tangential: ranked choice voting seems to be gaining momentum in progressive states. Definitely keep pushing for that, too.

I’ve only just recently begun exploring my gender identity. This is all very new for me, and very raw.

Gender is subjective. Defining it is like trying to nail jello to a wall. I cannot think of a single description that is exclusively feminine. When I imagine myself as a woman, I see myself in a new light, through a new lens. It feels like home. Gender is a construct, but that’s not to say it’s meaningless – marriage is a construct, too. If it truly is possible to redefine gender as anything you want, then why do I want so very badly to be a woman and not a man?

I never realized how much I despised my body hair until the first time I removed it. The first time my spouse called me “beautiful,” I cried, because until that moment I did not realize how many decades I’d been waiting to hear it. Gender is expressive. It’s how I see myself, but also how others see me. The desire to express is the desire to be known; I want people to know that I am gentle and nurturing, fragile yet strong, irrational yet relatable in my strangeness.

But I could be wrong about this, every single word of it, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Because I started down this path by deciding to want what I wanted, to feel what I felt, to act without trying to justify my actions to some invisible judge. And when I wear a cute outfit and see myself in the mirror, I smile. When my spouse calls me “wife,” I blush. When I think of femininity, I think of reinventing myself. To me, femininity is daring to live a life I have dreamed for myself. It is not troubling my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.

Gender is nothing. But it’s also everything.

Yes. Discontinued for 2024. They’ll revamp it at some unspecified point in the future, for some unspecified price point.

The lack of competitive minivans, hatchbacks, coupes, long-bed trucks, and station wagons really hurts uptake. While crossovers are all the rage for the average consumer, EV adopters trend away from the average, and having a wide selection can make a huge difference when it comes to overcoming the price barrier or difference in capability.

Case in point, I’ve seen motorheads swear they’d never touch an EV with less than 500 miles of range, only to recant the moment they saw a Honda E.

I’m gonna post this link to a former comment of mine, since this subject comes up a lot. Neither EVs nor public transit is a magic bullet.

The efficiency of public transit depends on ridership; nowhere in the world does it actually achieve 100% occupancy for more than a few minutes at a time, and nothing is more wasteful than a train running a circuit with only one passenger. At least by my calculations, it would take an average occupancy rate increase of 1.6x (for electric light rail) to 2.4x (for electric busses) over pre-pandemic levels for US public transit to reach parity with EVs, both in terms of electricity per passenger mile and tons of raw material per capita (such as steel, aluminum, copper, glass, and plastic). We’d need higher occupancy than the trains in Europe and the busses in Taiwan. Whether or not that’s geographically possible in North America is an open question.

Ebikes are great, no question there, but thanks to parasitic drain in cheap chargers, they use 1/3rd the energy a typical EV does (kWh per passenger-mile, adjusted for occupancy but not speed), when they should use only 1/10th. That’s a problem I expect to see solved in the next year or so, but it’s a great reminder that nothing runs on magic.

As I say in the linked comment, public transit has critical advantages in the fields of urbanism and human-centric city design. I like trains and busses, and I vote for them every chance I get, it just bothers me when people conflate these advantages with environmental impact.

They didn’t make it weird in any way really.

My dude, they were so dedicated to making it weird that they gave it no glove compartment.

The Chevy Bolt is no longer in production.

I will say this about Biden: the dude’s downright sneaky. It seems to be his administration’s main strategy to publicly walk back a major agenda point, let right-wingers celebrate, and then after the media hype (and potential for right-wing backlash) dies out, quietly split it up into smaller programs that get pushed further than the original agenda ever could.

• He blocked the rail strike, but then went back and ensured the unions got their sick leave anyway.
• He approved historic oil projects, but then went back and curtailed more oil production than he ever approved.
• He let Senator Manchin gut EV tax credits, but then spread that money out in the IRA and IIJA with green infrastructure funding so comprehensive that it has international attention.
• He’s been criticized for being soft on China’s military (by the right) and emissions (by the left), but the CHIPS Act and FABS Act and ban(s) on chip and tooling exports have all but eliminated China’s greatest source of geopolitical leverage: their nascent monopoly on electronics.
• The SCOTUS struck down student loan forgiveness, but Biden went back and forgave more, this time splitting it into multiple smaller programs that are harder to stop.

So yeah, it seems on-brand that the Biden administration would push for LNG exports after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and then go back later and curtail them instead.

Kill Six Billion Demons.

For a spoiler-free sampling of why:

http://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/throne.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/WON10r.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/KSBD55color.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SOT32-33.jpg

The artist presumably survives on a diet consisting entirely of heavy metal and Adderall.

Gives me these kinda vibes.

Hard disagree.

This week, I’m designing a circuit which would traditionally use relays, but I’m considering IGBTs instead. IGBTs weren’t designed for my industry, but they’re so cheap (thanks to quadcopters) that I can just overspec them and get the job done despite the lack of optimization.

Grid scale energy storage was already being researched before the EV boom – remember when people stopped talking about vanadium-flow? EV batteries undercut stationary-optimized batteries in $/kWh because EVs are lucrative enough to drive the research that much harder. Without the EV industry as the incubator for competing battery tech, stationary storage would still cost what it did in 2010.