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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • That was a great watch - it’s cool to find out the history.

    I must say, society is much better off without widespread use of TEL, but as someone who used to do racecar things, TEL works like magic. A little goes a LONG way, and Midgely did legitimately stumble upon something with very high effect for the concentration (they also touch on ethanol in the video which has the drawback of needing a lot).

    I’m not opposed to using it in a small scale racing context (like definitely not NASCAR) because it’s so fucking useful and the quantity is unlikely to cause harm. Unfortunately so much bad has been done with it at this point, I don’t think that’s a very popular opinion.

    Whatever your views on it, it’s the only thing that can make gasoline legitimately 120+ octane, and that has huge implications for some types of racing.









  • It’s hard to tell the intent of any poster, and there is a vehement anti-car movement here (and on Reddit) that allows for no exceptions to the idea that living should be done at high density, and without personal vehicles. It’s hard to read your intent and beliefs because the things you said before are very similar to what I’ve heard from the zealots.

    I’m trying to make the point that public transit easily misses on serving every origin, destination, and timing efficiently. Usually it misses badly, and my average experience with specific commutes is a 3x time penalty for transit vs driving. The penalty gets worse if done at especially early or late hours. Maybe this is exacerbated by car infrastructure and lower density, but the anti car crowd would have you believe it’s intrinsic and not a function of history and preference. At any rate I usually disagree with them on almost every premise.


  • You’re off by a factor of 4 on the grocery distance for the last 3 places I’ve lived, and those stores were CLOSE. It’s like 100cc of petrol to go that far, 200cc round trip, in lieu of 40+ minutes of fast walking (in which you can only carry limited groceries). I know all about it because I’ve done the walk many times when I didn’t have a car, and it fucking sucks.

    I’d say freaking out about 200ccs of petrol to get groceries is an insane degree of austerity, and the fact that people like you are proposing that is evidence of either an irrational need to control impact, or (if justified) evidence that the world is grotesquely overpopulated.

    Nobody owns 3 ton cars around here. Mine isn’t even 2 tons. In fact it’s pretty close in weight to a Fiat 500, while being generally more useful in every way. Everything you’re presenting is a strawman/caricature of what you imagine typical suburban car owners to live like. And yes, we should all be driving electric cars, but it’s not going to happen overnight.

    Edit: damn near nobody on earth would drive to get groceries if the store was 300m/1000ft away. Most people will never be able to live that close to the grocery store, work, or any other place that they routinely need to visit. That’s why your example is insane.



  • We’re very quickly moving to a place where the QUANTITY of people is so high, the QUALITY of their lifestyles have to be sacrificed to cut down on human impact. The impoverished/developing world has very low impact, at huge cost to their quality of life. Who wants to volunteer to live like sub-saharan Africans, or Indians in abject poverty to cut down on human impact? I’m certain they don’t want that life - and why should they? I’m sure they would like to travel on a jet to a beach vacation like those in more affluent countries do.

    I’m calling this eco-austerity. Instead of publicizing overpopulation and promoting low birth rates, we’re expected to belt tighten and give up on quality of life. It’s bullshit. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants.


  • This is exactly the point I’ve been making to them. I think it’s a bunch of people who have never lived outside of a major city, or grew up in new-construction actual suburban hell like Phoenix, DFW, Vegas, most of FL etc. Try old Midwest small city suburbs by comparison. Maybe parts of the northeast.

    They probably couldn’t afford a car after used car prices spiked sometime between 2000-2010, and never experienced the freedom and autonomy. They can’t imagine not being into a downtown club scene - it hasn’t dawned on them that they will probably grow up and hate living in a congested apartment world and might want to stretch out in a bigger house in a quiet neighborhood. It’s never occurred to them that not everyone works from home and their spouse may need to take a job 20 miles in the opposite direction.

    Do you sell your house because your job changed? Get divorced because your partner’s job changed? You can’t have ALL of the employment in easy reach by public transit from your home. This ideal-city with perfect transit and no commute is a handwave. UNLESS you live in a sufficiently small town that has everything but hasn’t blown up yet - and those aren’t dense enough for transit, and require personal vehicles.

    Public transit is also more inconvenient than convenient even if you give it a maximum advantage in density and stipulate that the trains will run 24/7 and frequently (NYC).

    It’s just inexperience with life or being an urban loving weirdo who can’t imagine that other perspectives exist. I want to spend all of my free time in places you couldn’t service with transit. They can’t even imagine it.


  • My #1 problem with all coffee brewing with any process, but especially aeropress, is clogged filters limiting rate of water movement. If AeropressXL uses a bigger filter, I’m likely to try it to see if that improves brewing.

    Typically the regular aeropress filter clogs badly enough when pressing (almost regardless of grind size or sifting fines) that it slows to a trickle. Press harder and the coffee leaks out the side of the filter. It’s frustrating.