tburkhol

u/tburkhol@slrpnk.net
4 posts · 147 comments

Recent posts

Recent comments

After I got pm2.5 into homeassistant, I started buying MERV13 filters for central air. A jury-rigged system for turning that on/off graduated to a proper wireless thermostat, and I now have an automation that turns the fan on at pm2.5>10, then back off <3. A good 5" filter will last 9 months before the time-to-clear gets to be too long. 3 ug/m3 can be a difficult lower bound, and if it seems like we get into a bad outside aq period, I'll bump it up to 6 with a trigger at 15. MERV11 could not hold even 10 ug/m3.

My indoor aq sensor spikes from fireworks on 4th of July and neighbors cooking on the other side of the shared wall. Most interesting to me is that aq - both inside and out - is worst overnight, not at rush hour.

ed: I use https://map.purpleair.com/ for outdoor air quality. Their global data can be polled with a (free) API key, and as long as you don't poll too often, the free data limit will last years. Someone wrote an HA integration for purpleair, but it polls to often and rapidly exhausts the free data.

Politicians, and even corporate C-suite, often confuse "cheaper to buy from the incumbent" with "incumbent has impossible-to-replicate technology," completely ignoring that it's way easier to invent something the second time.

Technology might have been a barrier in 1960's China, but they're a peer nation today.

There's a wider spectrum of "consuming audiobook" than of "reading."

Listening to that audobook so it's easier to take notes? Definitely as good as reading.

Audiobook on while you're on the treadmill? I guess there's some people who can read on the treadmill, so maybe it's similar, but it strikes me as very different levels of attention and likely recall.

Audiobook on while you do chores, cook, or write some other project? Definitely not equivalent to reading.

I know a couple of people IRL who never seem to have a positive reaction to anything. The proverbial "every silver lining has a cloud" people: got a raise? just means more taxes. Sunny day? skin cancer. Cloudy day? cold and mud.

For the particular people I know, it seems like a self-esteem thing - like they don't feel themselves worthy of happiness, so they have to preemptively destroy anything positive. Or maybe just be contrarian to prove they're smarter than everyone else. It's exhausting.

most seem to believe that voting makes them complicit in perpetuating the broken system

Maybe, if they're in a militia training to overthrow the system. Otherwise, they're just short of Sovereign Citizens, imagining they've got a cheat code to escape the moral burden of the failing system. I mean, definitely, let's change the system, but in the meantime, let's try for the least bad actors we can.

Agree. I'd love to see someone do a rigorous accounting of any degree program, especially with international comparisions. I once went through a couple of US state universities, and that generally supported the hypothesis of 'cost of instruction hasn't changed in 50 years, but burden of payment has shifted from state taxes to tuition,' but that was based on whatever the schools published as 'cost of instruction.' I'd believe that international cost of instruction follows purchasing price pairity, and it seems more expensive in the US because it's all tuition and no public payment.

When she first showed up, I remember one particular picture of her being all over right wing media. Not the most flattering picture, obviously. She was smiling especially broadly, showing lots of teeth, eyes wide open ("bugged out"). Sometimes associated with speculation that she might have Graves disease or some developmental disorder.

No question her appearance has made the media give her more time than they might, but she has a compelling story and she's connected with millennial voters much better than her septuagenarian peers.

My guess is Krusty tried a cheap induction hotplate, and those do have some issues.Most notable for me is that the element is smaller than the actual cooktop/burner-indicator. If I use a 11"/25 cm skillet, with 8"/20cm base, there's a cold ring around the edge and a cold spot in the center. You can get around that by constantly moving the pan around the burner, but that's annoying.

The US currently spends about $5 trillion on healthcare. About $1T of that goes through Medicare, another $0.9T through Medicaid, which leaves about $3T. Non-government spending is $1.6T through private insurance, $0.6T out of pocket, and $0.5T charities.

The "universal healthcare would be cheaper argument," which I believe, is based on shifting that $3T of private payments into government spending and bringing the ~85% efficiency of care by private insurers up to the 98% that Medicare claims. i.e.: eliminating roughly $400 B of insurance company profit. That still requires $2.5T revenue increase, which is about 50% of current revenue.

LibreOffice is generally a fine alternative to MS Office. I do collaborative writing with the MS world, and rarely run into any issues - mostly related to Track Changes. It's installed with the 'full desktop' version of most distros.

Python is part of every distro and a good place to start programming.