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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • It’s more of a relationship that is partially adversarial and partially cooperative.

    1. Healthcare expensive
    2. Insurance company pools resources of a bunch of clients to offer a gamble: pay a little now while you don’t need medical attention and they will pay if you do, in return for overall charging more than they pay out (when all clients are added up)
    3. Healthcare providers see insurance companies have extra money, want some, so jack up prices
    4. Insurance companies still want profit but also like the higher prices giving even more incentive to buy insurance so just jack up rates and deny coverage where they can to save money rather than use their bargaining power to reduce prices.

    Unlike single payer public option where the incentive is to both save money and maximize healthcare available, so it seeks a balance between keeping costs low enough to be affordable (at a societal level) while paying enough that doctors want to provide the services.


  • Just the other day there was a comment about a horse going crazy to the point of death because a paper lantern landed in its pasture. While the thread overall did convince me that releasing them is an asshole thing to do (another comment mentioned one burnt down a hay barn near them and it clicked just how stupid it is to just fly a candle surrounded in paper out to land where it will), it didn’t do horse intelligence reputation any favours.



  • Yeah, I read them as a teen and really liked them, so read them (well, the Belgariad, at least, then kinda stalled on the next series) to my daughter more recently and didn’t find them quite as enjoyable. They were still fun but full of a bunch of questionable shit. I’d say it was very boomeresque with a lot of its humour. Also the weird recurring “oh drat, you have out-negotiated me again, Silk!”




  • Yes, the barbarians famous in part for their architecture.

    Bigotry and tribalism are unintentionally pretty funny sometimes, or would be if they didn’t act as an excuse (in the minds of violent bigots) for violence against people that likely had nothing to do with whatever sparked the anger in the first place.

    Which makes me wonder now if that is an intended layer to the joke in the comic, first layer being agreeing with the dad that the kid is useless (boomer humour vibes there), second layer is that the dad is an idiot because none of those things are relevant to each other and he’s basically just complaining that she has “bad” interests while doing poorly in a class.


  • There’s peltier devices, too, which use heat traveling via different metals and maybe some sort of sorcery to generate a voltage.

    Also teslacoils use a different mechanism (friction I believe), though that’s a static voltage.

    In theory, you could translate a magnet through a coil instead of just rotating it to produce a current. Lol spinning a ring magnet through a rounded coil could be a different way of using spinning magnets (assuming it isn’t already done).


  • Not sure why you got downvoted. D&D is a medieval fantasy; I’m not familiar with any campaign set in our world let alone a historically accurate version of our world. And the goth movement of today is an aesthetic that I’m not sure even has a direct link to the Goths that challenged Rome, just like someone going around destroying shit wouldn’t have a direct link to the Vandals or maybe even know that the crime is named after the people who sacked Rome.




  • The laws of thermodynamics? Can’t create or destroy energy and overall entropy increases over time. A closed loop (or any cooling system) just moves heat away from the hot thing. So yes, they can be used as much as any other cooling system but it won’t stop the issue of “generating lots of heat”. That heat still needs to go somewhere. Dumping it into the atmosphere might be the best option if there’s nothing in the area that needs heat. Should probably build them next to steel plants or something like that. Then a closed loop would be better.