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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Car doors that aren’t on teslas don’t fail open, they are reliable enough that I can’t think of hearing about any failures that don’t involve a collision and deforming of the door (in which case it’s a fail closed and they use the jaws of life to get people out, or another door).

    An electronic latch is either engaged or it isn’t. Fail open would mean that in the absence of an electronic signal saying it should be closed, the latch will default to not being engaged, which would mean there’s nothing holding the door closed if another force acts on it.

    Don’t assume any benefit of the doubt about Tesla’s. I made no comment one way or another about what I think of their doors vs other doors. For the record, I agree completely that they fucked up this part of the design. The purpose of my comment was to say that taking that design and adding “fail open” to it won’t fix it. Fail open and fail closed both have problems with an electronic latch and the only way to fix it without causing other big problems is to design it in a way that still functions as a door that can be open or latched closed whether or not the electronic part of the latch is working.

    And I’m “deliberately misinterpreting” what fail open means? I’m having trouble understanding how it can mean anything other than how I’m interpreting it, even with your clarification, given the disagreement about other car doors failing open. Maybe it’s a misnomer that I’m misinterpreting but why are you assuming I’m doing this in bad faith?

    The downvotes themselves don’t matter, I asked because I wanted to know the reasoning behind them, well aware that bringing them up at all will probably result in more of them.


  • You cannot say that with statistical certainty. There’s about 8 billion people who haven’t eventually died yet and all it will take is one of them to break that 100%. You should include a disclaimer with an error range or you might get sued by someone who spikes someone’s drink with dihydrogen monoxide and then they don’t eventually die for botching their assassination.

    That said, the statistics are pretty strong. 99.9% is basically 100% plus wiggle room so no one can sue me, so readers should be aware that this dangerous chemical can also go by the name of hydrogen hydroxide and some food manufacturers try to sneak it by with the name aqua in their ingredients list.


  • For the fail-safe bit, if the latching system fails to an unlatched position, then the inertia of the door itself could cause it to open on braking and turns (or if someone leans on it or bumps it), since nothing else would be holding it in place.

    Obligatory fuck Elon Musk lol.

    It’s not generally as bad here as it is on Reddit. I still see the occasional comments that make me wonder if their author has any reading comprehension skills, but Reddit seemed to have representation from those kinds of posters in most comment threads. Even on the topics where Lemmy has general biases for, comments can still go off the beaten trail without getting crucified.

    Though with the smaller sample size of voters, I think Lemmy might see more cases where a comment initially goes one way and then swings the other way, which seems to be the case with my comment above, at least for now (and is part of the reason why I try to refrain from ever commenting on the votes, but usually there’s also a spicy or bolder part of my comment where I’m not as surprised if it goes negative).







  • Putting all the eggs in the solar basket has risks, too. Like a large volcano eruption that reduces the amount of light that reaches the surface for a few years would be a double whammy, affecting food production as well as electricity production (which we’d need to rely on to try to offset the food losses). If we’re instead facing brownouts or full blackouts, that’s a recipe for a complete loss of stability. I suspect less solar energy reaching the surface would also reduce total wind energy (less localized heating would mean lower pressure differentials, but I could be missing other significant parts of this equation).

    I’d be most comfortable with a nice mix of energy sources combined with mothballing instead of decommissioning some capacity as renewables are able to take over more and more of the day to day energy needs so that we’re prepared to deal with an emergency like that.

    I’d also like to see more food production moved to vertical farms that can be powered by electricity rather than relying entirely on the sun and weather. But I do understand that the scale of food production would make doing that with a significant portion of the food supply very difficult. But with climate change (plus nutrient depletion of the soil), keeping so many eggs in the “just keep farming” basket also doesn’t seem like a great idea.


  • I wonder if people will soon realize that that rage they have for scalpers is just directed at the amateurs and that the upper class is full of people doing pretty much the same thing just in less obvious ways.

    Your employer (if you work for a private for-profit company) pays you x for your labour and then takes the proceeds of the labour and sells it for y where y is (generally) much higher than x. A business is profitable when the sum of all y is higher than the sum of all x.

    If it’s a non-profit, then the difference between y and x must be put back into the business in some way, which could be an investment into an expansion of its scope or it could be a raise for some or all of the workers (payroll is not profit, it’s an expense). And that could mean just the CEO gets a raise, because some of the leeching is via different pay levels for different people that isn’t based on just the difference they are directly making to the income.

    Public services can vary. If the service is profitable, then the profit goes into the budget of the government entity(s) that run it, as determined by legislature. So everyone is acting as the middleman there. If it’s not profitable, then it’s covered by taxes, at cost. There’s still varying salaries but it’s subject to government oversight, so things shouldn’t get as unbalanced as they would in the private sector, at least in theory. Though even in the public sector, there’s this assumption that promotions should come with big raises, regardless of how the workload changes, so you can still have people at the top making orders of magnitude more than people at the bottom.



  • I assume it’s like the new car smell. Pleasant or not, it’s from inhaling plastic and paint particles and other chemicals as the excesses evaporate and loose pieces come loose and become airborne.

    Steam Deck is probably similar. Plastics, anti-corrosion coatings on heat sink fins, trace metals and solder, inks from the PCB, maybe the occasional ion leftover if there’s any micro-arcing.

    I’d guess it lasts a long time because the cooling airflow continually erodes whatever is in its path, while new cars don’t have that continuous erosion so eventually all the particles that were going to escape do and the ones left over are more stable.


  • I’m in Canada and don’t know anyone I can say for sure has been affected by gun violence or threats of it. I’ve personally been in a situation where I was trying to make small talk with a wannabe gangster and apparently asking about jobs can be dangerous I guess when they make money from mostly illegal shit and he threatened me until my friend came over and convinced him I’m not an under cover cop. But even that threat was a, “what if I had a piece” rather than “I’m going to shoot you”.

    I only ever saw or shot bb guns until in my 30s when I did some target shooting in my friend’s back yard. He kept his guns all locked up when he wasn’t using them, ammo locked separately. Partially for the obvious safety reasons (even though he lived alone), partially because a part of the license is that police are allowed to come and inspect how you are storing your guns. I don’t know how often this is used in practice (don’t think my friend ever had it happen), but it’s a sign that the legal state of guns is very different across the border.

    I can’t even think of any robberies using violence or threats of violence I have first hand or second hand knowledge of. Theft, yes, but like the “car was left unlocked and someone noticed” or “someone picked an easy to pick lock”. That last one happened to me, I figured out who it was and just told him to stop coming around and I’d leave it alone and I never saw the guy again. It might have been a bit dangerous if I wanted satisfaction from the situation, but I think there might have been an equal chance he would have just accepted the L and paid be back for the weed he stole.

    Pistols require a seperate license that is much harder to get. For rifles and shotguns, you can get a license as a hunter, recreational shooter, or collector (amateur is fine but you do need to get your hunter license first before you can use it to justify a gun license). There was a gun registry but the conservatives scrapped that the last time they were in power.

    For pistols, they are limited to certain professions such as police officer, military (I assume), or professional hunter/trappers who work in bear territory and aren’t necessarily carrying a rifle or shotgun ready to go if suddenly confronted by a bear. I believe there’s certain self-defense scenarios that allow them (like a proven threat that is difficult to neutralize, like with connections to organised crime).

    It’s gotta be extreme because carrying anything for self-defense is generally illegal. Like if you have a pocket knife you use to open packages, that’s ok, but if you carry that same knife for self-defense purposes, it’s an illegal weapon. Some knives like switchblades or butterfly knives that can be deployed with one hand are always illegal.

    I think this is a bit much, because knives that don’t fold are ok and IMO the question should be more about what scenarios one thinks it is ok to defend themselves with a weapon than having had that consideration at all. That said, the situations where someone might think a weapon is called for but isn’t are probably more common that situations where one is necessary to defend oneself. But I digress.

    The pretty much ban on pistols I think is what makes the difference. In some states, the risky part of carrying a pistol is about if you use it or if you specifically shouldn’t have one (felony or something). In Canada, just carrying it runs the risk of losing it and catching charges, which means that situations where someone would use a hidden pistol in the moment are more likely to have a cool down period while they go get their gun and might realize that it’s not worth it or might not be able to find their victim again afterwards.

    There is some gang activity but I think even that is way more chill here and any violence is probably more related to score settling than turf control. I get the impression that the cops are more chill about non-violent stuff here, so that could play into the equation in that the risk differential is higher if violence is involved. Or I could be wrong about that because I’m not a minority (but I suspect it’s because police violence is investigated (and not just by themselves) and dealt with more consistently here, and the lower likelihood of getting randomly shot probably allows them to be more at ease).