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Messages - Trekkin

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1006
General Discussion / Re: The small random questions thread [WAAAAAAAAAAluigi]
« on: December 13, 2018, 03:04:33 pm »
Quote from: greatorder on December 13, 2018, 03:03:28 pm
Any advice on removing burned oil from a stainless steel pan?

Steel wool and baking soda, wet just enough to turn the latter into a paste.

1007
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 13, 2018, 02:08:09 pm »
Quote from: EnigmaticHat on December 13, 2018, 01:03:04 pm
Edit: But then, most schools give kids way TOO much time off for Christmas.  And for summer.  Why are we raising kids to be in school 8 months out of the year, when they're going to be in work 12 months out of the year as adults? 

There's a common myth that the origins of summer break were as a way to get rural kids back on their farms when they were most needed, although that wasn't summer; the reality was more closely related to cities and schools being almost uninhabitable during the summer prior to air conditioning, at least by the standards of those wealthy enough to make policy. It had nothing to do with academic performance or preparation for adulthood, but compulsory education never has; it's always been a jail to keep kids from competing with voters for jobs, and its schedule of breaks has likewise been tailored to maximize their utility as status symbols during holidays, parade them in front of the grandparents for a while, and then get them back into the classroom before their novelty wears off.

1008
Other Games / Re: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE
« on: December 12, 2018, 02:11:52 pm »
Quote from: Madman198237 on December 12, 2018, 02:09:49 pm
Ecumenopoli, I think. Though that's more a Latin form of conjugation and polis is a Greek word....ah well whatever.

Alternatively, we can mix universes and call them Hobbitses Ecumenopolises.

Merriam-Webster agrees with the latter, actually, or rarely ecumenopoleis.

1009
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 12, 2018, 02:05:25 pm »
Quote from: UrbanGiraffe on December 12, 2018, 01:51:30 pm
Quote from: MetalSlimeHunt on December 12, 2018, 01:43:08 pm
This is high-quality bait, alright. How much?

How much you got?

It's not really a specific, finite amount. Depends on how we're feeling day to day.

Welcome to Trump economics, where everything's made up and the numbers don't matter.

1010
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 12, 2018, 01:02:32 pm »
And he's not actually ultra-wealthy since the value of taxi medallions tanked and his real estate ventures fell through. Apparently his legal payments have bankrupted him.

At any rate, the sentencing guidelines were 51-63 months. Knocking 15 months off the minimum for his cooperation is perhaps more generous than we would like, but not unreasonable, and it might serve to encourage others to cooperate, particularly if they're at risk of being charged in state court where Trump can't pardon them.


1011
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 11, 2018, 05:27:49 pm »
Quote from: smjjames on December 11, 2018, 04:14:14 pm
That's the ideal anyway. However, the Founding Fathers couldn't possibly have predicted someone as brazen as Trump or how America evolved the way it did. Yes, they warned against things like political parties (which happened anyway, because human nature) and tyrants, but they had an Age of (scientific and philosophical) Enlightenment view on things and thought things would stay Enlightened or something.

They did, yes, which is why Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man, must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. " His opposition to parties was also because they represented an alternative route to greater personal power, disrupting what would otherwise have theoretically been a stable distribution of powers operating via tug-of-war between the three branches. Their ideal judges and Congresspeople and Presidents and so forth were out for all the power they could get for themselves, and therefore all the powers assigned whatever offices they held, and so were held in check by the equally power-mad people in the offices whose power they were trying to usurp.

That's their Enlightenment views at work: not in the assumption that people were fundamentally civic-minded but in the idea that a system of laws could be constructed to reason functional government out of people without its best interests at heart.

Yes, Trump is unexpected; part of the idea behind a large republic was to smother factions of passion in the delays between when the 1780s version of angry tweets went out via horseback and when the sender finally got a response, leaving only factions operating on more enduring desires of the people. (The other was to provide a bigger pool of people from whom to elect representatives, on the theory that a bigger sample size is more likely to contain a more precisely representative person.) My point was not that the system is working as intended but rather that the reason it's not working is not because ･ﾟ: *✧ The Founders ✧･ﾟ: * were amazing people with an inviolable sense of duty to the Republic operating only on civic virtue, et cetera, and we poor modern-day slobs cannot hope to hold a candle to them. That kind of nostalgia for fake history is how we got MAGA in the first place, and it's toxic to the idea of respect for the institutions they built precisely because they were so ambitious they could only safely be pointed at each other.

In short, if we're ever going to get out of this, it's not going to be by electing "the best people." It's going to be by fixing the offices they hold.

1012
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 11, 2018, 12:55:47 pm »
Quote from: PTTG?? on December 11, 2018, 11:59:20 am
I believe that in previous eras, the answer was, "out of a sense of duty to the people of the United States."

So hey, maybe this will be a good way to find someone willing to sacrifice for the good of the country. Too bad their career will be ruined afterwards.

Don't believe the propaganda; the founding fathers didn't explicitly design a system to check ambition with ambition in anticipation of dutiful selflessness on the part of our elected officials, let alone their staff.

1013
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 07, 2018, 08:25:27 am »
Quote from: smjjames on December 07, 2018, 02:11:24 am
Ah, but it's just an ENGINEERING problem. True, it'd have to comply with stuff like earthquake resistance, but there would certainly be ways to reinforce such structures. Hybrid materials could work and materials research could look into emulating the beneficial properties of such structures while being stronger, and possibly cheap.

I did mention reinforcement; there are indeed ways to reinforce rammed-earth structures, running all the way from adding cement to the earth itself (this is one of the components of stabilized rammed earth) to filling in a normal frame structure with soil so it's not a structural material at all. Finding the point on that spectrum needed for a given structure in a given area is not a trivial problem.

We do have a hybrid material that's thermally massive like rammed earth, ten times stronger in compression, and inexpensive relative to other building materials: concrete. It's just that you can't make concrete on-site from the dirt already there, so it doesn't have all the environmental benefits of rammed earth. Any hypothetical concrete replacement is going to have the same problem purely by virtue of being manufactured.

It's a solvable problem, to be sure, but it's not one that needs to be solved for any particular structure when better-characterized building materials are available, so it makes rammed earth a less appealing option for construction. What is more, while those other materials also need testing, they're being tested for compliance with listed standards rather than having to figure out the relevant physical properties ex nihilo so it's possible to abbreviate the tests somewhat.


1014
Other Games / Re: Oxygen Not Included: Alpha Release
« on: December 07, 2018, 01:02:19 am »
Quote from: Jimmy on December 07, 2018, 12:34:25 am
Out of curiosity, what design do other people use for their bases?

Personally, I like 16 tile wide rooms, with 4 tile high ceilings, and 2 tile wide shafts between them to allow a ladder and a pole for transport. Does anyone else use something different?

I also use 16x4 rooms, except I raise my lavatories to 5 so I can put a better carbon dioxide pit between them in the mess hall above. However, I use a 6 tile wide central shaft in the early game so I can shrink it to 3 tile wide (for better airflow than 2-wide) when I'm ready to move to Heavi-Conductive main power distribution and build little art-filled transformer housings on every floor. Every other shaft is 3 wide.

1015
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 07, 2018, 12:52:08 am »
There are legitimate engineering concerns with structural rammed earth as regards reconciling the desires of environmentalists with the constraints imposed by everything from physics to regulation. Even NAREBA's proposed standards for SRE construction include empirical testing (ASTM's E2392 is similar), because the people who want rammed earth want to use local materials, and soil is obviously different in different places.  If you don't know how strong the SRE is, you don't know what you can build with it, so now your architect doesn't know how to change the design until someone builds some local SRE and tests its relevant structural characteristics, which costs time and money. That also doesn't tell you about wear resistance, particularly resistance to moisture, so the longevity of the building is also harder to predict; you can of course point to rammed-earth buildings that have endured for millennia, but you don't see all the ones that didn't, and we know pure SRE doesn't fare well against things like earthquakes and is typically found where certain characteristics of climate and soil converge. So now the inspector, however completely trained, also can't be certain about its structural soundness over time. Reinforcement helps, but in addition to being less sustainable and more expensive and less trendy it's also unknown how the soil will react to the reinforcement, so that's more testing.

This is generally when the same people who think all problems are caused by other people, particularly experts, just not being as clever as they are will rush to suggest how other people's money be spent in sweeping programs to solve the problem -- and, as usual, if we had the will and ability to make those changes we'd also solve a lot of other, more pressing problems.

1016
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 06, 2018, 11:49:54 pm »
Quote from: redwallzyl on December 06, 2018, 11:40:40 pm
Also our insistence on specific types of houses. The US needs more earthen based houses and other climate appropriate designs instead of sticking wooden houses with AC and green laws in the desert. Also rammed earth houses are just generally awesome.

This is true, but it's important to keep in mind that where the relevant zoning laws are concerned it's not so much "the US" as a national entity so much as the individual cities trying to keep affordable housing impossible right where it's most needed because, in short, "job creators" don't like being reminded that poor people exist. This is a problem that needs tons of little solutions rather than one big law handed down from DC.

1017
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 06, 2018, 11:32:19 pm »
Quote from: Folly on December 06, 2018, 11:24:51 pm
Bomb threat currently disrupting CNN's programming.
Is there any chance it might not be another Trump Nut?

It's just a phoned threat, so yes, I'd say so. It could just be some random idiot prankster with no real ideology.

Sure it's more likely to be political, but until we actually see the MAGA shrine let's reserve judgement.

1018
Other Games / Re: Oxygen Not Included: Alpha Release
« on: December 06, 2018, 09:44:03 pm »
Quote from: Aoi on December 06, 2018, 03:17:27 pm
So running pipes filled with with water in a hydrogen/wheezewort room, then running that chilled water through my base would be better for cooling than gas? (And presumably, there are even better liquids for that out there, that would be a bit more difficult to obtain at my point.)

I've actually been dripping it into my post-sieve reservoir to cook off the germs. Now that I think about it, a dual-chambered polluted water reservoir that gets cooked pre-sieve would probably work out better, since the sieve output is at a fixed temperature, as I recall... Does the frozen biome actually stay cold? I feel like its been warming up, considering I have to mop up my entrance every ten cycles or o.

If you'll forgive my being pedantic, it's better only in the sense that it can absorb more heat. A full pipe of water absorbs 41790 DTU/C compared to full pipe of hydrogen at only 2400. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will do so, thermal conductivity being separate from specific heat capacity, but in general water is a better coolant provided you can run long enough pipes. Wheezeworts just can't breathe steam.

Regarding your dual-chambered idea, it could certainly work to, say, cool your geyser output with clean polluted water (like from Carbon Skimmers), sieve most of the heat away, and remove the rest in an aquatuner loop run through your germy post-sieve lavatory water tanks to heat them, although I'd make careful use of timers to ensure the water stays hot enough for long enough to decontaminate it.

1019
Other Games / Re: RimWorld - basically the sci-fi Dwarf Fortress
« on: December 06, 2018, 03:32:17 pm »
Quote from: Majestic7 on December 05, 2018, 11:36:44 am
I have that flaw too; I just can't create a dystopia. Worst things I've done in Rimworld is harvesting organs from pirates, who, well, are baddie marauders. Even then I've usually let the prisoner go afterwards as a compensation. I might have harvested hearts and/or livers from really bad baddies though (psychopaths mostly).

Oh, I can't manage a dystopia either. I'm using a mod to harvest organs from corpses now, mostly because it doesn't make sense to me that it's only possible to get one vital organ from a given body. This has had a fortunate side effect, in concert with the 67% instant death on incapacitation rate, of providing such a surplus of organs that I no longer need to keep prisoners for spare parts and therefore punitively perma-incapacitate people.

The worst things I do now are nutrient paste dispensers and, under conditions of gravest necessity, going without tables.

1020
General Discussion / Re: AmeriPol thread
« on: December 06, 2018, 02:41:56 pm »
Quote from: McTraveller on December 06, 2018, 02:26:33 pm
Regarding Millenials "just being broke" - why is that?  What is preventing those people from providing goods and services that would allow them to not be broke?  I'm not being facetious here - I mean really, what is preventing it? Is it that there is just no demand? Is it that the landowners can just sit fat and happy on their property and not have to care about the impoverished? Is it that barriers to entry to markets are too high (e.g., if nobody is hiring you, why not start your own business)?  All of the above?

Like Ispil said: nothing's stopping them providing goods and services, but there's a great deal stopping them being paid for them at a rate commensurate with the increase in costs of living and student debt burden.

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