Maybe there’s another layer if you know who he is but I think it’s just some fucking guy and the point is the words and his facial expression/body language.

I’m not sure if this is available everywhere, but in California you can put up a bond in lieu of insurance with the DMV, either with your own money or with a surety bond company.

So you can do it, they just require proof in the form of the bond that the money is available when needed. They won’t just take your word for it. They might take the word of a company with a $1.3 trillion market cap, which is probably a bad idea. You get hit with one of these fuckers and instead of the admittedly shitty but known process of dealing with an insurance company, now you have to deal with a huge company that doesn’t want to admit their dumb camera only system is at fault.

What is there to breach? You’re already exposing your your real identity when you post under your real name with this new requirement. As long as the methods for verifying your identity aren’t something scammers can exploit there is nothing to expose. If, for example, you could use your photo ID with everything but your pic and name covered, and maybe also birth year for age checks, all it does is remove the ability for people to be cunts with impunity.

I’d have to give it some more thought, but I’m not against this right away. The Internet has become a vile place. Maybe if you wouldn’t say something in public for everyone to hear, you shouldn’t post it either.

How the fuck am I just learning that toasters can have little racks on top for croissants?

I assume you can’t actually bake them like this. This is just for reheating them while keeping them crispy and flaky, right?

We’ve all heard “it takes money to make money.” But rich people know it’s better to use other people’s money.

I have a question about this I haven’t been able to answer.

Is the problem the “flushness” or the lack of mechanical linkage to the door latch?

I’ve been in several Teslas, every model but the Cybertruck, and you push on the fat part and the skinny part comes up, which you pull to open. But as I understand it, that just activates an electrical servo or something that unlatches and partially opens the door, and that’s the problem because without power pulling the handle does nothing.

I had a Jaguar F-Type R (I think Range Rovers have the same handles) and it had flush handles that you could set to pop open when you approached, or you could hit a little button on the forward end to pop open the rear end or, like the Tesla, you could push on the forward end to manually raise the rear end and when you pulled on the handle you were mechanically unlatching and opening the door, unlike the Tesla. You could disconnect the battery and still open the door, which as I understand it, you cannot do with a Tesla. Would this be ok?

If it seems far fetched that every news organization keeps talking about flushness when that’s not the problem, I’m willing to entertain it because that’s what happens every time my area of expertise ends up in international news. Whenever my profession, or a related one, is in the news they almost always get it at least a little wrong, and sometimes ridiculously wrong. And they say the same wrong things across all news sources all over the world. I, and others in my group of professions, can see why this happens. They get some basic information but lack context so they interpret it wrong and what comes out is complete nonsense, or at least a little misleading.

Yeah, I went back and changed it to a strikethrough to avoid more confusion.

People always get pissy about these generation things. It’s not about some people being better than others. There was a period of time where being able to use a computer meant being able to take a tabula rasa machine, install an os using a bunch of disks and a large manual, and figure out how to fix anything without the internet. There was also a period of time where home computers were becoming common. Those two periods overlapped and created a group of non-professional people mostly (MOSTLY) born between 75ish and 85ish that are much better able to use and troubleshoot tech than people born before or after.

But you always end up attracting a bunch of douches saying “I was born in (whenever) and I have a degree in (whatever) and I know more than people blah blah blah.” Yeah, I’m not talking about professionals or hardcore hobbyists, I’m taking about regular jerkoffs that had to figure this shit out without specialized education or the internet. It was a unique period that created a group a people different than what came before or after. No judgement, it just is. For some reason certain people take offense to that.

Thank you, autocorrect strikes again.

You’re all educated professionals. This meme is more about your average user.

Yeah, this is more young X and old millennial. Xers born in the late 60s-early 70s and millennials born in the late 80s-90s don’t know shit.

I’ve heard us (young Xs and old millennials) described as the organ Oregon Trail generation. We grew up along side the tech so we understand it better than your average person from before or after.

I don’t know what’s worse, those dipshits that never take the time, or the ones that come in sick because sick days are for impromptu golf days.

I’ve never understood this. Even from the viewpoint of an extremely selfish person; do you want someone with COVID, the flu, or a cold making your food, or even just interacting with you in a retail environment? And as for employers; how shortsighted are you that you don’t realize that while one sick person coming in may be better for productivity than them staying home, that quickly becomes five sick people working much less efficiently instead of four healthy ones and one person out sick?

I assume the Trisolarins were taking a little poetic licence there. I was being hyperbolic. I don’t remember the author being specific about the timeline but I had the impression the cataclysms came on pretty quickly (much too quickly to be explained by errors building up, I would think they would constantly update their calculations with their observed track so significant errors should always remain well into the future), and they were just trying to get several months, maybe a year, of warning so they could cache some things that would give them a headstart next time around. Why they didn’t just have that all the time, i don’t recall that being explained. I guess short-sighted politicians are universal.

Are you just going to keep moving the goalposts and nitpicking my characterizations, or answer the question? Do you think the author understands the basic concept of the three-body problem?

I assume you have an opinion on it because you stuck your nose in here. Or did you just want to throw out an “um ackchyually”?

Now i just think you’re being disingenuous.

Are you really trying to say you think the author understands the three-body problem?

Are you saying the errors from iterative calculations of three stars and a planet build up so fast, and that they move so fast, that they can go to sleep one night with everything fine and completely without warning wake up the next morning with a sun filling the entire sky or all three suns looking as far away as Sol from Neptune?

No, they’re not just trying to find an equation, which may not be possible. They say it’s impossible to predict where the objects will be in the near term, which is nonsense.

The three-body problem doesn’t say it’s unpredictable, just that there is no universal equation to describe it. You can still determine where things will be with a high degree of probability with iteration. The earth, sun, and moon are a three-body problem but we know where they will be tomorrow, next year, next century, next millennium, etc. The error bars increase with time but the moon isn’t suddenly going to be ejected beyond the orbit of Pluto in an unpredictable way due to some bullshit from the chaos of the three-body problem. The entire solar system is a (very large number)-body problem, but we know where every major body is going to be with a large degree of certainty for a long time.

Whether or not they could have found a way to preserve their civilisation thorough the periods inimical to life is also beside the point. They claim they couldn’t predict the occurrences, which is bullshit. You don’t need a computer for that, even a biological computer (which I admit was actually kind of a cool concept), you just need paper and pen.

You can’t have pretentions to hard sci-fi and just talk nonsense. Either be hand-wavy soft sci-fi or make your explanations conform to our best current understanding. You can’t try to explain shit and also get the most basic concepts wrong.

Thank you. It was so annoying reading that constantly thinking “that’s not how the three-body problem works, and even if it was, that sure as hell doesn’t describe Alpha Centauri.”

And that’s just the beginning. People calling this shit hard sci-fi is crazy.

This is very much not hard sci-fi. My biggest problem with it is how it pretends to be.

The author doesn’t even understand the eponymous scientific term.

Edit: I don’t know enough about every culture to dispute your claim that not all cultures write soap operas, but China sure as hell does. They produce more and have a larger audience than anywhere else in the world. They like the same shit everyone else does. Your bullshit claim is Orientalism at best and fetishization at worst.

Help replace the lost funding. $5/month or $60/year to your local station gets you access to PBS Passport streaming.

If you want to, you can donate more when you sign up, those are just the minimums.

Given who we’re taking about, I won’t hold my breath for it.