• 0 Posts
  • 168 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • The North Carolina legislature has a supermajority of far right republicans. The NC GOP is currently brazenly attempting to throw out legitimate ballots to steal a state supreme court seat, and the courts are going along with it. If they want to move for political concerns, I don’t think NC is enough of an improvement to justify the disruption involved.



  • Another way to view it is that college classes are filled with your future colleagues, and should be treated similar to a workplace. Students should generally dress similarly to how they expect to dress in their future workplaces. Whether that excludes a tank top is a matter of discretion, but clearly the proffesor did not find it to be professional. There’s no hard and fast rule, but I am surprised by the indignant tone in the comments here. Lectures are the domain of the professor and its not outlandish for them to set expectations about what they consider acceptable conduct for their lectures.


  • The issue is that it’s a waste of resources. A dam is harnessing energy from the rainfall over hundreds to thousands of square miles of land area. So the resources required to build it, even though large, are very efficiently used over decades of use.

    A tiny system uses orders of magnitude less materials but harvests many orders of magnitude less power. A tiny system probably isn’t going to ever generate more energy than it took to manufacture.

    Systems like this are at best a novelty. We need to all be wary of greenwashed scams, and this is one of them.








  • The stuff that is heavier than water ends up in the river delta, everything else dilutes into the ocean. Once it’s in the ocean, there’s not much humans can do about it. Promoting populations of sea grass and filter feeders like mussels can at least capture pollution in a form that settles to the seabed and improves water quality.

    There will be pockets of pollution that persist for a long time, and floodwaters could stir some of that back up, but the above poster is correct. Cleaning up a river can be as simple as stopping the sources of the pollution. A dirty river is dirty because stuff keeps getting added to it. Of course stopping sources of pollution is way easier said than done.




  • Is the sales tax in your area 7.5% by any chance?

    $16 x (100/107.5)= $14.88

    I don’t see any gloves priced at 14.88 on their website at a quick check. I wonder if the store is trying to set a price that tallies to an even dollar amount and doesn’t know the connotation. I only recently learned about those numbers being associated so I would like to believe a benign explanation. Maybe you could ask to talk to a store manager next time you see it an make sure they know to avoid that price point.



  • I don’t like this system for two reasons.

    The first being that bookshelves should have a restraint system that attaches to the walls. You could probably improvise something, but the video lacks that element.

    The second is that the alternating brick pattern is weak for an open faced box. That puts a significant portion of the weight of higher courses on the middle of the span of lower courses. You can see some of the lower levels bowing signicantly. Since the back is rigid, but the front can flex, that will increase the tendency to tilt into the room and makes the tipping hazard worse. Add in an old floor that is concave and you have a significant hazard.

    I like the concept, but this needs some changes before it is safe.

    Edit: I’ll suggest potential improvements rather than just naysaying. You could make two different width boxes. A full width and something like .8 width. You would stack the boxes alternating full width with partial width. The full width box would need 4 alignment pins and 4 slots. The boxes would stack in line vertically, but due to the alternating widths would still lock adjacent columns together. The important thing is that the vertical walls would be close together rather than landing in the middle of the spans.

    Then I would add a cap board that can be bolted into the top boxes and would be used to attach a L bracket to a wall stud. Yes, this decreases portability, but not crushing children is more important than convenience.