AlotOfReading

joined 11 months ago
[–] AlotOfReading 25 points 5 days ago (3 children)

"welp" isn't related to whelping. It's a way to write the word "well" when it's used as an interjection (meaning it has no definition). The word is often pronounced with a terminal -p and people started writing the letter in text.

[–] AlotOfReading 5 points 5 days ago

It means the manufacturer is required to offer to buy it back. If the manufacturer resells it after fixing the issues, there must be paperwork attached and given to the next purchasers stating that it was a lemon.

[–] AlotOfReading 1 points 5 days ago

The security level should be the user's choice. Maybe I don't care if my neopets account is hacked. Maybe the 2fa offered actually decreases security, like the SMS 2FA required by my 401k account that can be used as the sole recovery factor, bypassing the password. Maybe I'm accessing from a system configuration that makes 2fa really annoying, like a build system running inside a fresh VM on every run.

The service doesn't have the context necessary to know when 2FA is warranted.

[–] AlotOfReading 1 points 1 week ago

You're misunderstanding how their wealth is distributed. By and large, they're not directly owning the land and paying taxes. They just own significant stakes in the actual companies holding property. I'm sure they own a house or three, but it's not significant compared to their other assets.

I'm not taking a position on whether property taxes are good. I think they are. I'm just pointing out the discrepancy.

[–] AlotOfReading 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I had hoped the point would be pretty obvious. Most people's homes represent a significant part of their net worth, often a majority of their assets. The unrealized gains on that are taxed.

Billionaires generally (are there even any counterexamples?) do not have the majority of their net worth stored in assets that are taxed the same way. It's a meaningful difference.

[–] AlotOfReading 2 points 1 week ago

Other than Apple music and iCloud, they're generally less intrusive about popups than Microsoft. Their tactic is to completely prevent competitors from integrating with the system at all rather than nag you to use a setting. For example, there's no way to use Google maps or Spotify in all the same ways you can use Apple music or Maps.

[–] AlotOfReading 7 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Normal people regularly owe taxes on unrealized gains. That's what property tax increases are.

[–] AlotOfReading 2 points 1 week ago

There's multiple things you're mixing up here. There's the "up" in the global coordinate reference frame. This could be based on the local system, though that makes entering and exiting the system a tiny bit more difficult. More likely it'd be based on galactic coordinates.

There's also the ship reference frame in the comic. This probably won't be oriented towards the global coordinate system. It'll be oriented towards whatever the engines, sensors, and gravity need. Because the ships will all be in orbit, their orientations will probably be changing constantly relative to other ships and the global reference frame. There's no reason to orient in a single direction and lots of reasons not to (it wastes energy, points your sensors away from the things you want to see, etc).

[–] AlotOfReading 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The ecliptic North Pole (Earth's plane of orbit) is a bit over 27 degrees off the plane of galactic rotation. Which one is "up" and why would a spacecraft that's done any number of inclination changes to get there care about it?

[–] AlotOfReading 4 points 1 week ago

Just did a quick eBay check. The cheapest 350hp ICE I could find was a rebuilt $3,000 Chevy engine. A new one is more like $6-8k. An equally powerful, brand new Siemens motor was $1,500.

This makes sense when you think about it though. An electric motor is basically just steel with a bunch of coiled wire with some control electronics. An ICE is hundreds of pounds of precision cast and machined metal. The cost driver in electric vehicles is not the motor, it's the batteries.

[–] AlotOfReading 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

A torque converter is part of the whole transmission system even if it's a separate housing. When you buy a new transmission, it comes with a torque converter.

Torque converters also create the majority of heat in automatic transmissions and are why automatic transmissions get coolers in the first place. How many manuals have you seen with transmission coolers?

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