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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • If you wanted them just for charging it would be fine. Barrel jacks are still pretty ubiquitous.

    If you want them to also be data they get less great. They make 3.5mm/etc jacks with 3 “pins” and I assume more. But every time you’re inserting/removing the cable it’s rubbing past the insulators separating the contacts. Their failure per plug/unplug is higher than something like USB-C where the 24 contacts are being pushed together instead of brushing past each other. It would suck if you put in your USB-barrel and one of the contacts broke/bent.








  • I’m aware that saving face is a thing in Korean culture. But when the cause of the plane crash is a North Korean bomb or a Soviet missile it seems disingenuous to lump that flight into your list about how Koreans save face as they crash their plane. Kind of like you can’t find many examples and have a publisher deadline looming. At least one Korean speaker takes issue with how Gladwell interprets relatively benign cockpit communication. It also doesn’t explain why other cultures that also have saving face as a ‘cultural thing’ don’t have similar problems. When you get down to it plenty of airliners flown by pilots of every nationality have crashed due to miscommunications and pilots being overworked. Its one of the few core reasons airliners crash anymore.

    The ferry incident is terrible, but that’s also hardly unique to Korea. Many of the lifeboats on the Titanic launched less than half full because passengers were assured it was safe by crew and thought they’d be better remaining on the ship waiting for rescue.

    Gladwell might get more benefit of the doubt if he doesn’t also have a bizarre chapter on how Asians are better at math because rice is hard to grow. He switches very quickly from talking about how rice farming is important to southern China, which he can’t get statistics for, to just that “Asians in general are good at math”. The only study he references (Trends in International Mathematics and Science) lists Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan having higher math scores, none of which are super dependent on rice farming. Thailand and Indonesia are massively dependent on rice farming and performed very poorly on the math study, but Gladwell doesn’t mention that. “Rich countries have better education systems” isn’t a very interesting chapter.


  • Outliers needs to be taken with some salt. A lot of his examples seem to either be restatements of well known bits of sociology or fall apart when anyone with a relevant interest/specialty looks at them.

    My personal ‘favorite’ is his use of 7 airline crashes to claim that Koreans are “culturally” predisposed to crashing airliners. 2 of the crashes happened because of Soviet missiles, another happened because of a bomb on the plane, and crew culture was not a significant factor in any of the official accident reports for the rest. This was also his conclusion from 7 incidents.

    It honestly sucks because “do more authoritarian cultures have more problems with crew culture” is actually an interesting question. You could contrast German flight crews and Australian flight crews maybe. Or contrast anyone really, instead of looking at 7 incidents and concluding it was because they’re Korean.




  • Not OP but my electicity is <$0.10 / kWh because of where I live. It seems like it would take much more than 13 years to hit the break even point on upgrading the monitor just because of energy efficiency.

    Even if the newer monitor has less of a lifetime environmental impact, throwing out the old still working one is still wasteful. It’s already made and working. Using it longer lessens your environmental impact. If you repair the old one when it eventually breaks, that’s still less of an impact than an extra ~20% electricity usage. Especially since electricity generation is getting greener all the time.



  • The important part about Flat Earther beliefs that always seems to get left out is that they’re a fundamentalist christian sect.

    They don’t believe the Earth is flat because of “the evidence”, or even necessarily that the Earth is flat that’s just the corner of their belief structure that got famous. They believe that the biblical Truth from God is the enemy of Science and that “they” are trying to keep that from people, in order to lead people away from God. Then comes the “evidence” and “debates” which are them trying to meet non-believers halfway, but fundamentally not understanding how/why science is a way of processing information.

    Fortunately/unfortunately most Flat Earther’s got made fun enough publicly enough that they’re not really preaching it anymore. They’ve since moved on to other apocalyptic religious movements like Qanon/MAGA.


  • There are ~20,000 objects in orbit large enough to be tracked as hazards. Personally unclear if that includes active satellites, but that’s ‘only’ another ~10,000.

    There are ~100,000 airline flights a day worldwide.

    How crowded does the sky look with planes?

    Yes space junk is a thing to be concerned about / regulate. But at the scales involved it’s basically negligible. We’re orders of magnitude away from any kind of cascade or locking ourselves out of orbit or any other doomsday scenario.