• 13 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I appreciate that you might have gone past the old testament, however it is still part of the book and would otherwise be considered safe speech protected from hate laws.

    I’m sure you can agree that someone advocating murder of gay people should not be considered ‘protected speech’ solely because its written in the bible. And if we have to start picking and choosing which sections of the bible are protected and are not, that seems like a far more subjective line than ‘hate speech that can be backed up by the words of a holy book is still hate speech’.

    The bar for hate speech in this country is way higher than most people seem to think it is. You need to be advocating for genocide, publicly inciting hatred likely to break the peace (ie a pastor preaching that its the responsibility of the congregation to murder gay people), or inciting hatred (again, private conversations are not included, but a pastor preaching ‘you should scorn, despise, and hate gay people’ would be).

    Currently the ‘its a religious belief’ covers you from hate speech, but I dont think it should. If you’re preaching those, you’re not emulating or encouraging your congregation to emulate the works and teachings of Jesus.








  • Tbh its not even that we need to sacrifice quality at this point. we have the knowledge to do good builds.

    Build lowrise or duplex townhomes that are big enough for families, in the 800-1200sqft range, and save on building costs. Save on the space, so land costs and servicing costs stay low. Sure its not as appealing as a suburban house with a huge backyard and no shared walls, but its a lot cheaper, and it’ll alleviate the housing crunch.

    I’ve said it before, but my firm works with municipalities as the external engineer to review development plans. Those have all dried up the in last 6months, despite the housing crunch still being here. Know why? Costs have come down since people can’t afford it, which means developers are willing to sit on vacant land and/or approved plans and hope that costs will rise again before building. They’re hoping this dip is a short term correction.

    This isn’t sustainable. We need a nonprofit or govt funded builder providing supply regardless of what the financial feasibility of doing so is, based on the required demand for housing. Housing should not be a commodity, nor should be it a retirement plan.







  • When I go to do road reconstruction, enormous amounts of effort (and money) are spent avoiding underground utilities. In the event they can’t be avoided, the municipality is on the hook for (generally) half the relocation cost.

    And they dont have to pay to have their stuff there in the first place.

    The key part in this argument -

    Guelph Coun. Leanne Caron says many of those agreements were signed decades ago, when natural gas was treated as a public good and Enbridge was still a Crown corporation. Today, Enbridge is a for-profit company and Caron says the old rules no longer match current economic, environmental or planning realities.

    That basically sums it up. Turn back to a Crown Corp and continue gaining free access, or pay like the private corp you are.

    Locally, as discussed in the article, they can use it to prop up small scale green infrastructure grants/loans which help further reduce the use of those gas pipelines, and reduce upsizing or new installation requirements.



  • NYC has ~3.75mil housing units.

    Based on your 5amp draw, thats 600w, which a bit on the low side, but we can use it as an average. Assuming most (75%) of residences have AC units, 2.775 million AC units try to run at the same time, using 1665 MW.

    Also, please stop using that 150MW usage of times square, particularly if you’re taking it from GoogleAI. I cannot find ANY data supporting that (see possible originating claim for its use here).

    Data instead suggests ~35MW draw for the billboards, using a huge overestimation of the draw (since it assumes all buildings in times square have the same number/size of billboards as times square tower, which is false). This is ~2% of the energy required/used by AC units (not including starting draw), which is tiny.

    Its worth us pushing for, but lets be clear about what kind of impact that will have on the grid.



  • I appreciate you finding that article - interesting one.

    I’m very much amateur curler, and can’t see how that tiny touch would impact it, but maybe it does at that level of competition.

    Using a perfect shot to stop on the button with no spin, and energy= all kinetic (1/2mv2) =friction energy(F*deltaX), we get a release speed of 1.8m/s (with a .006 coefficient), and a 2.98m/s speed (with a 0.016 coefficient).

    Using the same equation, I go ahead and rerun the number, but adding a distance of 0.1m, a value I used as a good approximation of a reliable accuracy of an Olympic throw, and a time of 0.2s (the approximate time I estimated based on the video), which means a deltaX2 of 0.36m, or 0.596m.

    1/2mv2+fapplieddeltaX2 = ffrictiondeltaX Fapplied comes out to 0.326N to 0.526N which is a miniscule amount.

    That seems to indicate that a tiny touch DOES have the potential to make a significant difference. Some sources say 0.25 to 0.5N is required for a keyboard press, so its roughly on par with that

    But, how much of a difference does the sweeping make on stone speed? Its easy to say that tiny change can impact things, but how does it compare to, say, sweeping hard vs not sweeping?

    This study shows a sweeping change of 45+/-8mm. Thus a change of 25% on top of that is not insignificant.

    So the last question is, does it make sense for someone to train specifically by cheating this way rather than doing it right and just pushing off with a more accurate force? That’s likely going to be subjective, but seems difficult to me.

    Who knows, maybe this is a crutch and it is making a difference. Sounds like they need to stop doing it any case, whether a way they’ve trained or not. Or wear a camera showing they don’t touch the rock and just hover their finger behind it.


  • The problem I have is with how productivity is measured. Either GDP or GNI are both negatively impacted by positive planning and bureaucracy, but are driven positively on paper by cheap, breakable goods requiring regular repairs and replacement.

    For example, City/designers of a road take an additional 500 hours to do design work which provides an increase of 10 years in lifespan. Now that doesn’t need to be repaired for longer, meaning less future costs (driving down the cost side), while at the same time increasing the hours spent. This has a negative impact on GNI, but is actually a GOOD thing by any rational persons view of the situation.

    Or someone produces a set of clothes at a reasonable price that lasts twice as long. If people all move to that product, our GNI would drop despite that being a positive change.

    Or thousands of frivolous or stupid lawsuits due to problems avoided by proper planning and/or bureaucracy show up as a benefit to GDP/GNI despite being a waste of time and money.

    Using productivity as an end measure misses a lot of important points and measures that a modern society should be aiming for.