Vote Share in the 2024 BC General Election so far
  • CountVon CountVon 16h ago 100%

    The minority party that establishes confidence and supply is the one that gets to form a government. Under a C&S arrangement, the smaller party agrees to support in favor of the party forming a minority government for all motions of confidence and budget bills ("supply"). A government that fails to pass a budget bill or fails to defeat a motion of no confidence is said to have lost the "confidence of the House", which would force a new election.

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  • Honey
  • CountVon CountVon 2d ago 100%

    Is it exploitation? I'd argue slave or prison labor is exploitation because the workers have no freedom of choice. Bees are free to leave, and the queen will in fact do so if not content with the conditions in the hive. If the queen leaves, all of the bees will swarm with her and you'd be left with an empty box.

    Beekeeping strikes me more as symbiosis. The beekeeper provides ideal conditions, far better than the average location that would be found in the wild, and can help protect the hive against threats like mites. In exchange the beekeeper receives a share of the honey produced by the hive.

    No beekeeper takes all of the honey from the hive. Only the top box (the "honey super") of a typical hive stack is harvested. A grate below the top box (a "queen excluder") prevents the queen from entering it so no larva are laid in the top box. The workers bee are smaller and can pass through the grate to build out comb and produce honey. The comb and honey in the bottom boxes are left to the hive to feed its workers and produce the next generation of bees, ensuring the survival of the hive.

    A queen excluder cannot be used to prevent swarming long-term as the drones that gather the pollen also won't for through the grate! An excluder might be used to delay swarming and buy time so the beekeeper can offer another solution, like adding more boxes to the hive or splitting it into two hives. Better beekeepers proactively manage their hives, e.g. by setting up an empty hive in advance to essentially offer a swarming hive a new ideal home whenever they're ready for it.

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  • After eating, when do you digest food the fastest, laying down, sitting or standing?
  • CountVon CountVon 7d ago 100%

    No, the opposite actually! Any amount of exercise will help with GI motility, but intense exercise causes the digestive system to slow down (source).

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  • After eating, when do you digest food the fastest, laying down, sitting or standing?
  • CountVon CountVon 7d ago 98%

    None of the above. The correct answer is walking. Moving around helps kickstart the GI tract.

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  • It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word
  • CountVon CountVon 2w ago 95%

    Oh I'm streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

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  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearBO
    Books 3w ago
    Jump
    Looking for "R-rated", gritty, gorey high fantasy books
  • CountVon CountVon 3w ago 100%

    And it definitely ticks the box for "fucking brutal."

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  • I'm chaotic good
  • CountVon CountVon 3w ago 100%

    Chaotic neutral. Vertical monitor is best code review monitor.

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  • Why does my beard grow back faster after shaving?
  • CountVon CountVon 3w ago 100%

    I don't believe it actually does grow back faster, it just seems that way. The first inch or so gives the impression of growing back faster because the hairs are thicker at the base so they're more visible and less prone to breakage.

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  • So I'm not allowed to see how much data usage certain apps use?!?
  • CountVon CountVon 3w ago 100%

    I'm all for de-Googling, but... is it possible that Restricted in this context mean those apps have no data usage because they're restricted from using it? It could be trying to say that the app is restricted, not that you're restricted.

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  • Just paint the old prop grey and turn it on its side. No one will notice.
  • CountVon CountVon 4w ago 100%

    The owner of the Cantina doesn't like droids, so my head canon is that he's repurposed scavenged droid heads as drink dispensers. Kind of a "drinking from the skull of your enemy" type thing.

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  • Is Ryze Mushroom Coffee Just Another Craze?
  • CountVon CountVon 1mo ago 100%

    Is there any benefit at all

    Maybe! There's at least some scientific evidence that chemical compounds in mushrooms can have medicinal effects.

    Bias disclaimer: I put a lion's mane mushroom tincture in my morning tea because it may have a neuroprotective effect (source). My father's father had dementia, my father is currently in a home with profound dementia, the chances it's going to happen to me are very high. It'll be years before I know whether lion's mane mushroom will do anything for me (and even then you couldn't claim anything from one data point), but I'm willing to try anything as long as it's affordable and has at least some plausible evidence behind it. This isn't the only thing I'm doing of course, I've also overhauled my diet (MIND diet) and lost 30 pounds (obesity is correlated with dementia).

    why can’t you make it your self by pulverizing dried mushrooms of the same variety they use into powder and making the coffee yourself?

    You absolutely could. Or, you know, just eat some of the same mushrooms. The benefit to dried products like Ryze, or tinctures like the one I use, are that they're convenient, easily transportable and self-stable. I've cooked up fresh lion's mane mushrooms several times, but not super often because they're not in many stores in my area and tend to be pricey for the amount you get. I've also grown my own from a kit but that takes significant time and a little bit of daily attention to maintain optimal growing conditions. The tincture is convenient and relatively affordable as far as daily supplements go.

    3
  • Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'
  • CountVon CountVon 1mo ago 99%

    Keep in mind that Larry Ellison is fundamentally incapable of caring whether or not "citizens will be on their best behavior." The only reason he would say a thing such as this is because he sees an opportunity to make money from such a system.

    Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.

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  • OpenAI is reportedly going all-in as a for-profit company
  • CountVon CountVon 1mo ago 100%

    OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

    Honestly though, they're skipping right past the "be good to users to get them to lock in" step. They can't even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn't deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I'm ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don't work now that the free money era has ended.

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  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearDI
    DIY 1mo ago
    Jump
    Help - Cannot Drill Fully Through Block Wall
  • CountVon CountVon 1mo ago 100%

    If it was concrete in the floor I would guess rebar

    Rebar is used in hollow block wall too:

    I'd remove one of those circular knockouts at the back of the wall box to drill an inch to the left or right.

    5
  • Why doesn't Firefox implement Private State Tokens?
  • CountVon CountVon 1mo ago 100%

    Tl;Dr the protocol requires there to be trusted token providers that issue the tokens. Who do you suppose are the trusted providers in the Google and Apple implementations? Google and Apple respectively, of course. Maybe eventually there would be some other large incumbents that these implementers choose to bless with token granting right. By its nature the protocol centralizes power on the web, which would disadvantage startups and smaller players.

    2
  • Why doesn't Firefox implement Private State Tokens?
  • CountVon CountVon 2mo ago 100%

    Private State Tokens are Google's implementation of the IETF Privacy Pass protocol. Apple has another implementation of the same protocol named Private Access Tokens. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this protocol in its current form, and its existing implementations in their current forms. See here for their blog post on the subject, and here for their more in-depth analysis.

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  • Neo-Nazi Ex-Trump Dinner Guest Bitterly Rages At Trump For Admitting He Lost — Rants ‘You Deserve To Be Charged!’
  • CountVon CountVon 2mo ago 100%

    The part where he complains about how "it's such a callous indifference to the sacrifices made by (Trump's) supporters on (Trump's) behalf" just sent me. He thinks Trump is being callously indifferent now? Amazing that they'll never allow themselves to realize or admit that Trump never gave a shit about them in the first place.

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  • Can you safely heat people with microwaves?
  • CountVon CountVon 2mo ago 97%

    One of my grandfathers used to work for Nortel. One of the projects he worked on was the Trans Canada Microwave, which was a microwave relay system built in the '50s to carry television and telephone signals across Canada. The towers were installed all over Canada in remote locations and high elevations. Maintenance on the system could be required even when the weather was bad. My grandfather told me that the engineers who worked on the towers would sometimes stick their hands in front of the microwave emitters to warm them up. It's anecdotal, but I'm relatively confident that it's theoretically possible to warm people with microwaves.

    Big caveat, though. Those engineers knew how powerful the emitters were, they knew that microwaves are not ionizing radiation and thus posed no cancer risk, they knew roughly what percentage of their hands was composed of water, and thus how much heat energy their hands would absorb from the emitters at a given power level. That's the only reason they were willing to do it, well that and they were probably the kind of people who got a kick out of doing something that would appear insane to most of the populace.

    It seems very unlikely to me that a microwave system could be turned into a safe people-heating system for at least the following reasons:

    • Feedback loops. All modern HVAC works on feedback loops. Your thermostat detects that the temperate is cold, it fires up your furnace / heat pump / electric baseboard / whatever and produces more heat. When the thermostat detects that the temperature has reached the set-point, it shuts off the heat. Current thermostats would not be able to detect the effect of microwave heating, which prevent the establishment of a feedback control loop.
    • Uneven heating. Things with more water will heat up a lot faster than things with little water. This is usually fine when microwaving food since most of our food is water, in varying concentrations. If you're heating up a burger in the microwave, you can put the patty in by itself for a minute, then put the bun in for 15 seconds, then reassemble a burger that doesn't have a cold patty or a stiff overcooked bun. If you're heating up a person, you can't ask them to take out their almost-entirely-water eyeballs to ensure they don't overheat.
    • Failure conditions. If your heat gets stuck in the on setting, the maximum result is probably that your house will get sweltering hot but not hot enough to kill you in a moderate timeframe. Depending on power levels, a microwave heating system could internally cook people in their sleep if it entered a failure mode where the heating got stuck in the on setting.
    • Efficiency. It takes a considerable amount of power to run even a small microwave, and that's blasting microwaves into a relatively tiny cubic area. Trying to heat people would require microwaving a much larger volume, and said volume would also be moving around. Trying to emit microwaves in even a house-sized volume would probably be prohibitively costly.
    • Interactions with metal and other objects. Microwaves can create intense electrical fields around metal objects, and those can become intense enough to create plasma and electrical arcs. Hell, you can create plasma in your microwave with two grapes. Blasting microwaves into a large volume with unknown contents would be a great way to create an unexpected fire.
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  • Young male voters are flocking to Trump – but he doesn’t have their interests at heart
  • CountVon CountVon 2mo ago 100%

    Not the person who made the comment, but here's my understanding. A "third place" is somewhere you spend a lot of time when you're not at home (the first place) or school/work (the second place). Third places such as community centers were vital to the civil rights movement in the 60s, it was where much of the movement's meeting, debating and organizing took place.

    The Reagan administration systematically defunded any of these politically active third places that were receiving federal funds, probably because they were worried that they'd be infiltrated by those scary communists. They were so worried about what the organized people might do in the future that they did everything they could to kick the financial struts out from under these community organizations. In many cases this destroyed some or all of the local community benefits that those organizations were actually providing.

    This trend cut across the political spectrum too. The Clinton administration did its own wave of defunding, though I suspect that was more for economic (i.e. neoliberal) than political ideology. Combine the lack of community investment with the rise of the internet, and you arrive at the situation we have today where third places are becoming increasingly scarce. It's hard for communities to develop and maintain a cohesive identity when there's no longer any metaphorical "town squares" where the people in that community gather.

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  • ![](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/99eca25d-9f75-45d7-a072-041ae62cb687.jpeg)

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    store.steampowered.com

    Copying the patch notes from the official Discord, for anyone who can't load Steam News links: 🛠️ PATCH 01.000.202 ⚙️ 🌎 Overview This update includes * Stability fixes 📍 Gameplay We have updated the stats UI for weapons to take into account any explosive damage done by them. This is to give weapons that do damage with explosive projectiles a more fair representation in the UI. Most notably affected is the PLAS-1 Scorcher. 🔧 Fixes * Fixed some crashes that occurred when deploying to mission. * Fixed some crashes that occurred during extraction and right after it. * Fixed crashes that could occur if the squad deployed a large amount of support weapons. * Fixed various crashes that could occur during gameplay. * Fixed a crash that could occur when using heat based weapons. * Fixed crashes which could occur if a player died while using the jetpack. * Fixed crash which could occur when large volumes of enemies were present. * Fixed crash which could occur when the player picked up a snowball. * Fixed crash which could occur when completing an objective. * Fixed hang that could occur while navigating the social menu. * Picking up Medals and Super Credits will no longer lock the player in place. 🧠 Known Issues These are issues that were either introduced by this patch and are being worked on, or are from a previous version and have not yet been fixed. This list is not exhaustive, and we are continuing to identify issues and create fixes. These are organized by feedback, reports, severity, etc. * Player cannot navigate to the search results from the Search Bar in the Social Menu. * Various issues involving friend invites and cross-play: * Player name may show up blank on the other player's friend list. * Friend Request cannot be accepted when the requesting player changed their username before the request was accepted. * Cross-platform friend invites might not show up in the Friend Requests tab. * Players cannot unfriend players befriended via friend code. * Players cannot unblock players that were not in their Friends list beforehand. * Damage-over-time effects may only apply when dealt by the host. * Players may experience delays in Medals and Super Credits payouts. * Enemies that bleed out do not progress Personal Orders and Eradicate missions. * Certain weapons like the Sickle cannot shoot through foliage. * Scopes on some weapons such as the Anti-Materiel Rifle are slightly misaligned. * Arc weapons sometimes behave inconsistently and sometimes misfire. * Spear’s targeting is inconsistent, making it hard to lock-on to larger enemies. * Stratagem beam might attach itself to an enemy but it will deploy to its original location. * Explosions do not break your limbs (except for when you fly into a rock). * Area around Automaton Detector Tower makes blue stratagems such as the hellbomb bounce and be repelled when trying to call them down close to the tower. * Planet liberation reaches 100% at the end of every Defend mission.

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    Looks like we may soon be getting more things to buy using samples and requisition slips. The Catalog Expansion has no cost, and buying it does nothing. The Upgrade Effect text must be null for Catalog Expansion, that field just shows the effect for whichever upgrade was previously selected. Edit: It's been acknowledged on the official Discord, looks like it's unintended: > **ALERT: ROGUE ITEM DETECTED.** The Ministry of Truth has confirmation that a rogue item called the "catalog expansion" is temporarily visible in the Ship Management menu and, in accordance with regulations, we instruct all Helldivers to avoid this rogue item until further notice. The Ministry of Truth cannot confirm the reliability or safety of this item, nor can they confirm its origin.

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    www.youtube.com

    Quick summary for anyone who can't watch the video, with descriptions taken from the [accompanying news post](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4176599795011036515) on the Steam store page: * releases April 11th * new armors and matching capes * CE-07 Demolition Specialist (light) * CE-27 Ground Breaker (medium) * FS-55 Devastator (heavy) * no info on what bonus each set has * new primary weapons * BR-14 Adjudicator (marksman rifle) - "Deliver righteous judgement to your enemies with accuracy. This armour-penetrating assault rifle is best used against smaller groups." * CB-9 Exploding Crossbow - "Kaboom! Enjoy powerful exploding bolts that dish out max damage upon direct impact. Gravity must be accounted for when aiming." * R-36 Eruptor (explosive) - "Keep your distance… this bolt-action rifle fires jet-assisted shells that explode shrapnel in all di-rections upon impact. All directions. Even your face." * new grenade and secondary weapon * G-123 Thermite grenade - "This little beauty can stick to surfaces before burning up to a toasty 2000°C." * GP-31 Grenade Pistol - "Does what it says on the label – a pistol that fires grenades. Don’t forget to reload between shots though." * new booster * Expert Extraction Pilot Booster - "Need to get out of a jam fast? This booster lowers the time it takes for the extraction shuttle to reach the extraction beacon. Home in time for dinner." Edit: added link to Steam store page news post and summarized info from the same

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