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TauZero

@ TauZero @mander.xyz

Posts
13
Comments
455
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Is it possible that the rich are so rich that they have created inflation?

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  • You overlooked the hundred trillion dollar coin inside the [...].

  • Is it possible that the rich are so rich that they have created inflation?

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  • No, money at rest does not create inflation. It is the consumption of goods and services through use of money that does. Trump could mint a one hundred trillion dollar coin and put it on display in the White House, and this would have no effect on prices, even though he is now richer than all Americans put together... as long as the coin stays on display. But the moment he tries to deposit the coin at a bank and start spending its value to pay for goods and services, all prices will skyrocket, because now there are more dollars competing to buy the same amount of food, the same number of houses, the same number of services, that existed/was being produced before, the same that you are trying to buy.

    Remember those news articles last year how the wealthiest 10% of Americans drive 50% of consumer spending? That's how the rich influence prices. Not hoarding - consumption. The poorest 90% (those earning less than $250k/year, namely you) only have access to 50% of food and consumer goods and such. One person from top 10% consumes 9x more than one person from bottom 90%. If wealth inequality did not exist and the 10% consumed as much per person as the 90%, then you would literally be able to buy 1.8x as much stuff as you can now, with no other changes in productivity required.

  • What’s a cheap purchase that’s completely changed your life?

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  • You'd think so! right? But instead it is the idea of smearing shit on your ass with your fingers and a piece of paper that now sounds uncomfortable to me. This is the "completely changed your life" element of it. I've been using paper for decades no problem, but now I hate pooping outside of home because there is no bidet there. Beware!

  • What’s a cheap purchase that’s completely changed your life?

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  • Bidet - don't need any fancy standalone appliance, just a $50 nozzle that goes under the toilet seat and plugs into the water hose. Haven't paid a penny for toilet paper in 6 years.

  • Kremlin says Russia has invited Ukraine's Zelenskiy to come to Moscow for peace talks

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  • The last guy on Putin's naughty list to fly into Moscow got an AA missile up the tail. Put me down for that.

  • Am I financially enabling child labor in 3rd world countries by buying second hand fast fashion?

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  • Unpopular opinion: yes, you do. 2nd-hand markets contribute to the value of the original item even for things like clothing. When you buy a 2-year old car with intention to sell at 4 years, the price you are willing to pay includes the resale value you expect to get later. Which in turn influences the price of the new car that the original buyer is willing to pay. Another commenter mentioned cell phones having a chain of resales too.

    But even for cheaper items that are donated instead of resold, the 2nd-hand use of the item has a non-zero effect on the original production and sale of it, because the act of donation itself is a notable event. You give away an item for free instead of throwing it in the trash because you think the item still has some value and you want someone else to enjoy that value. This works whether you give it directly for free to a person, or donate to a charity shop that then resells it. A charity donation is also recorded as tax-deductible.

    The act of donation frees you from guilt/responsibility for throwing the item away without using up its full value. You are then free to buy more of the same item new. Faster than you would have otherwise, had the charity shop not existed. You also value it more, knowing that someone else can use it after you.

    So here is a practical scenario for how this effect works. Imagine what would happen if instead of buying problematic child-labor fast fashion clothing from a 2nd-hand charity shop, you refuse! You keep wearing the clothing you have, or buy some non-problematic boring 2nd-hand clothing instead. And I do too. And every other charity store shopper stops buying them as well. Then the charity shop will refuse to take donations of those fast-fashion clothing, right? Just as they would refuse if you brought them a box of VHS tapes today. When the people would bring boxes of their mildly-used fast-fashion clothing for donation, they would be turned away - "nobody wants to buy those!"

    Those people might not believe in their responsibility to eliminate child labor, but they still thought of themselves as good people, because they wanted to donate the remaining value for free, but now they can't. They have to either keep wearing those clothes themselves, or throw them in the trash without feeling good about it. They end up buying fast-fashion clothes less frequently, or buying other clothes instead. Either way, the value of new fast-fashion clothes goes down and less of them are produced, and fewer children are employed to make them. All because of 2nd-hand.

    IMO, the only way to consume the remaining value of a 2nd-hand item without having an influence on its original production, is to literally pull it out of the trash. And you have to do it in a way that the original owner isn't aware of it. Because if they knew, they might feel good about it. Like a baker who makes extra bread knowing that most of it will be unsold and go in the trash at the end of the day, because they have seen people rummaging in the trash bin for food at night (not saying that's bad, just pointing out the chain of influence).

  • Follow Up: PGP vs. HTTPS for Software Authenticity

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  • In practice, PGP signatures/keys usually work using the "trust on first use" model. The web-of-trust/physical verification of ID documents is a fun idea, but I've never met anyone who has used that method in the wild.

    The difference between publishing hashes and signatures/keys vs. publishing hashes-only, is that you only need to trust the published keys the first time. They don't change from year to year. If one year someone hacks ubuntu.com and changes the image files and hashes AND uploads fake keys with signatures, you will notice that the signatures fail to match your saved keys and suspect something fishy.

    This will not save you if this is your first time visiting ubuntu.com that happens to be the same day that it has been hacked, but it will protect everyone who has ever visited before and saved the keys. But if the releases were published with hashes-only, every year would be a new hash and a hack would easier slip through.

    You can also try to verify the Ubuntu key out-of-band in places other than ubuntu.com, such as in blog posts, old forum/twitter/reddit posts, etc. In principle, hashes could be published on 3rd-party blog posts too, but again they change every year so not as interesting and you won't find them in as many random places as the pubkeys.

  • Abolish ICE politician Ilhan Omar sprayed point blank (w/syringe) by Pro ICE individual with unknown substance(?)

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  • That's how they got Kim Jong-nam (Kim Jong Un's brother) in 2017. A syringe filled with nerve gas (in liquid form) sprayed in the face while he was walking through a Malaysian airport. 30 minutes later - dead. The airport staff were confused at first as to what even happened, and assassins were on a flight to Pyongyang before anyone even realized this was an attack.

    Not the only time nerve gas sprays to the face have been used for assassination either. Russian agents have killed several people in England in 2018 in an assassination attempt using a spray bottle of nerve gas perfume.

  • 83-year-old man convicted of killing Uber driver who he wrongly thought was scamming him

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  • Last time I considered this it was $10M, though I might need to update it for inflation now.

    That is irrelevant here though, because a robbery is considered a life-or-death situation in law not because of the monetary amount, but because of the everpresent threat of bodily harm. Whether explicit, with a pointed gun, or implicit. "Give me your money!" ... or else... is implied. If the criminal could reach into your pocket and take your money without use of force, without you even knowing, it would not be a robbery but a pickpocket larceny and precisely not covered by deadly force. But a criminal ordering you to give your money is a deadly situation, even if you only got $0.10 in your pocket.

    You are implying we should value human life and just hand over the money, but that's not the issue here. There is no guarantee that you would not be harmed even if you cooperate. A fast food place in my city got robbed, the cashier handed over all the money but the robber got mad there was only $100 in the register, and shot dead the cashier and the customers. The criminal has already demonstrated reckless abandon by engaging you in a robbery, there is no longer any expectation (as would be with any normal stranger) that physical harm would not imminently follow. Next to a literal attempted murder, a robbery is the most dangerous confrontation you could ever find yourself in. I am glad that the law of my state treats it as serious as that.

    If you are in a robbery and you are absolutely sure that no harm would come to you if only you cooperate, that is nice, and you can graciously demonstrate your value of human life by handing over your $100, or $12k, or $0.10 or whatever, but such security is not a privilege everyone shares.

  • [troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge

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  • physicists are quite confident only blackholes can Hawking radiate

    Good to know! I was starting to get worried :D

    you absolutely need a horizon to get radiation

    Does the particle need to travel all the way from the horizon to reach you? How long does that take? The horizon still exists on the centrifuge, if only for a moment, shifting slightly from one instant to the next. In principle, at any moment you could detach from the centrifuge and fire 10g rocket thrusters in a straight line instead. In that first instant there is no way to tell the difference between the two.

    I say this because in the linked paper, the "acceleration" experienced by the positrons was the bouncing off the atomic nuclei in the silicon crystal, which takes place over the space of a few angstroms, or at most within the 3.5mm size of the crystal, in the time given by the speed of 178GeV positrons (+Lorenz contraction). This instant was sufficient to claim Unruh effects were occurring.

  • 83-year-old man convicted of killing Uber driver who he wrongly thought was scamming him

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  • Yes, you are right! A scam is not one of the specified crimes. As I understood it from the article, the phone call started out as a regular bondsman scam, but then escalated into threats of harm to the old guy and/or loved ones held in custody at the remote end (?), which elevates the severity, possibly up to a robbery-in-progress. The caller must have dropped the pretense at some point given that the old guy realized it was a scam yet still had the money ready to go in a package on the table. I'd have to read the actual court case to know what really happened, which is too much work, so I wrote my response under the assumption that the old guy was told a family member would be harmed unless he gave the money to an associate who was on the way.

    In such a situation, it would be reasonable to initially detain the courier for investigation. If police officers were hiding in wait at the house, they would have done the same thing. It was unreasonable to continue to believe the courier was an associate once it was clear it was an uber driver following an app. So the old guy was guilty for detaining an innocent person without qualified immunity, and crazy for not listening to an explanation of what an uber driver is. Notwithstanding this, there seemingly were threats of physical harm through the phone, so if the old man did treat it as a robbery, and if the courier had been an associate, and the associate did get detained (by the old guy or by the police), and the associate did attempt to escape, there could be a situation where there was an imminent threat that the associate would return to join his accomplice on the phone and the two of them would inflict the promised harm upon the family member they were holding hostage. That would justify the use force up to possibly deadly force to stop the escape. It depends on what exactly was being said on the phone, though again we don't have the court transcript. Unlikely but possible.

    Of course none of this happened, the courier was an innocent bystander, there was no hostage, and the old man was totally unjustified for opening fire under these circumstances. But that what the court trial is for. I do not dispute the outcome and I'm glad this person is now in prison. What I don't like is the headline saying a crazy guy shot a taxi driver over some missing change (that he himself misplaced). And then people argue that all self-defense is unjust because it lets crazy guys like this get away with murder. Which he did not get away with. And he was not crazy in the way the headline described it, but was in an intense situation which he might have been led to believe was life-or-death. And in the process he did violate self-defense rules in three specific ways. So we'd better learn the rules, and consider in advance our personal approach to the use of force, so we can act cool under pressure later. It could happen to you too.

  • If gravitons are particles, can it be said that they are like radiation around a black hole, and if so, why doesn't the black hole lose energy/mass from it?

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  • Also, in physics there is something weird about the exact way the 4 force fields are defined mathematically: they have particles - photons, gluons, higgs, etc. - but the particles are not exactly the same as the functioning of the force field itself! Two magnets get attracted to each other, but you are not going to see any photons moving between them back and forth. The Higgs boson is somehow instrumental to the mass of all matter, yet it itself is so heavy it took a gigantic LHC just to generate a few. There aren't any loose Higgs bosons flying around for you to catch, as far as I understand.

    Whatever happens to gravitons (still hypothetical, not even a theory) and the field of gravity, they would probably behave the same way. You would need to expertfully understand the exact mathematical description to understand the difference between the particle and the field.

  • 83-year-old man convicted of killing Uber driver who he wrongly thought was scamming him

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  • It is insane to shoot a taxi driver for giving you the wrong change. It is not insane to shoot in self-defense someone robbing you for $12k. Unless you are so anti-gun as to argue that self-defense is never justified and we should just roll over and let ourselves be robbed/kidnapped/murdered, but then I'd say it is you who are insane. Even in my liberal guns-practically-banned state, shooting and killing a robber is perfectly legal (NY PEN 35.15 2b). Here, a robber doesn't even need to explicitly threaten to use deadly force against you first - being in a robbery is specifically listed among a few select crimes automatically considered to be a life-or-death situation. You can also, even as a non-police officer, use force to detain a criminal or to prevent escape from custody, which is the situation that happened in the article.

    Under the law, you have to shoot or detain the right person though. You not only have to think they are guilty, and not only does your thought process have to be reasonable, they have to also actually for real be guilty. If you kill an innocent, you are liable for murder. If you arrest an innocent, you are liable for kidnapping. That's what the court trial is there to determine. The old man failed on the latter two requirements and was justifiably found guilty. A police officer has an additional qualified immunity. They can arrest someone who they think is guilty, and not get in trouble if the person turns out to be innocent. As far as I understand it, legally this is the only distinction between a police officer and a private citizen in US law.

    Also, neither a police officer nor a private citizen can use deadly force to prevent escape (other than a few special cases, like in prisons). That's another strike against the old man. If a police officer had shot the courier trying to walk away like that, they too would be (or ought to!) put on trial for murder, as that's not covered by qualified immunity. Like in the example of that guy who got killed on video in 2015 while trying to walk away from a traffic stop.

  • 83-year-old man convicted of killing Uber driver who he wrongly thought was scamming him

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  • Misleading headline. As written, it sounds like someone shot their taxi driver for mistakenly thinking they gave them the wrong change. In reality it was an uber parcel courier who was shot while unwittingly acting as a money mule for a phone extortion scammer.

    Usually these scams involve money mules who are in some way complicit, in the "ask no questions and look the other way" sense, and who receive a cut of the money they launder. But this time it was a bona fide courier from a courier service (the article mentions Uber working with police to identify the user account that placed the delivery order) - a case of literally shooting the messenger.

    So the old man did not wrongly think he was being scammed, he was literally being threatened and robbed for $12k, just not by the uber courier. The headline is clickbait for not making that clear. The courier was not being scammed, just performing a routine paid delivery that happens to be for a criminal.

  • [troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge

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  • Another complication is that even if the centrifuge slows down as it gets heavier, you can recover most of that mechanical energy when you hop off the centrifuge with your now full jar. Then you can boost it back up almost up to full speed. So I'm not sure exactly at what point you input energy into the system to instantiate the particles. When they hit the belljar bottom transversely maybe? Is this some kind of Maxwell's Demon situation where you need to close the jar before the particles fall back out?

    Also good to mention Earth! Logically, if Hawking radiation works for black holes it seems as if it would also work for any star or planet! But I've never seen this mentioned anywhere.

  • [troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge

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  • Oh for sure, science is never boring :D but compare the intense situation in the troll science pic to the displayable results from the actual experiment (fig. 1c):

    Tip: evidence for the Unruh effect you are looking for is this 2mm difference right here:

    The teal dashed line is the power spectrum predicted from theory including the Unruh effect, and violet dashed line is without it. The data points match the teal line better. But you can't even see that by eye from the noisy dots! You need to do chi-square statistics to even prove it. (The dots below 30GeV - outside the "accelerated thermality" region - are not included in the analysis because they are guaranteed to be incorrect, as the experiment wasn't sensitive in that range.) Boooring!

    What the authors of the paper glance over in a single sentence before moving on to better things is that they had to shoot a FRICKING POSITRON DEATH BEAM FROM THE MFKING LHC through a crystal target and watch the resulting Bremsstrahlung gamma rays that would melt your bones off to obtain these datapoints. Talk about intense!

  • [troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge

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  • Like many other popular weird physics effects, it has been accepted non-controversially by scientists and then popularized for decades in fun thought experiments and pop-sci videos, all of which neglecting to mention that no actual experiments have yet been performed. This lack of grounding leads to spread of confusing statements like "the Unruh particles exist in the accelerated frame but not in the lab frame", which make no sense, for how can there be two separate realities that coexist? Luckily we now do have a first Unruh experiment from 2019 https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00043v7 and the temperature did rise and reality did not split apart. So no longer hypothetical, just routine and boring.

  • Science Memes @mander.xyz
    TauZero @mander.xyz
    troll science

    : Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge

  • What operations can be done in quantum computing?

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  • The gates of a digital quantum computer are basically equivalent to the transistor gates of a regular CPU. Here is a list. The two notable ones are the controlled NOT gate (which is the equivalent of a 2-bit XOR gate) and the Hadamard gate (which is a useful unary permutation of a single quantum bit). Using these two gates you can construct any quantum circuit, just like NAND can make any computer. The challenge is to physically build these gates in a way where quantum bits can pass through them without interacting with them or the rest of the machinery (which would destroy their superposition). There are some other gates too, which, though equivalent to a combination of the above, may be easier to physically build or represent longer circuits condensed into a single operation.

    Any digital quantum algorithm can be built using these gates. You are right that the individual operations do not know what the true outcome is, they just perform theirs CNOTs and whatever. You cannot move closer to the true outcome bit by bit. Instead you have to use clever algorithms to combine all the outcomes together in such a way that all the outcomes you do not want destructively interfere. This is only possible (in a way that is provably superior to polynomial classical computation) for a select number of known quantum algorithms, such as Shor's algorithm, and generally for the BQP complexity class. Notably, quantum algorithms provably CANNOT solve NP-complete problems (unless P=NP that is). There is no way to arrange for destructive interference in the general case. So the algorithms only work for almost-but-not-quite-officially-NP-complete problems like integer factorization and quantum physics simulations.

    There could be more useful NP-but-not-NP-complete problems out there that can be solved by a BQP algorithm, but for which we haven't found the algorithm yet! That's the allure of theoretical quantum computing. Then there is the practical engineering challenge of building these gates and chaining them into circuits. Finally there is analog quantum computing, which is what many currently-realized quantum computers essentially are, but I don't know much about them. I think as a computational complexity class they are equivalent to BQP of digital computers.

  • Call of Daddy

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  • It looks cool, I'd use it! When you start making fun of me I'd just shrug and carry on, because I don't care what judgements some weirdo makes about my accessories.

  • vegan @lemmy.world
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    They will sell you vitamin D, they don't want you to know its source

  • Science Memes @mander.xyz
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    Jigsaw Trolley Problem

  • Bike Commuting @lemmy.ml
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    Interlocking city-wide bicycle networks? Nice!

  • Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    Trying to buy right size bicycle wheel online

  • Science @mander.xyz
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    Browse through 4096 concepts identified within a 512-node toy neural network

    transformer-circuits.pub /2023/monosemantic-features/vis/a1.html
  • Science Memes @mander.xyz
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    Sleeping Beauty Trolley Problem

  • Science Memes @mander.xyz
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    The real double-slit quantum eraser they don't want you to know about!

  • Mildly Interesting @lemmy.world
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    This fast food order kiosk accepts cash

  • Ask Science @lemmy.world
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    In terms of kWh per kWh, by how much does greenhouse CO2 from running an air-conditioner heat up the rest of the Earth?

  • Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    Cowboys in westerns always have standoffs because the one who draws first attempts murder, to draw second is justified self-defense

  • Physics @mander.xyz
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor

    arxiv.org /abs/2307.12008
  • Memes @lemmy.ml
    TauZero @mander.xyz

    Mixed nuts for me, not for thee