In other news today...
-
@remi said in In other news today...:
premium diesel (so really the most expensive...)
And is that “premium” diesel actually worth the extra money? My understanding is that diesel is not very sensitive to what it burns.
-
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
I decided to be part of the problem and filled up my half empty gas tank.
-
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
premium diesel (so really the most expensive...)
And is that “premium” diesel actually worth the extra money? My understanding is that diesel is not very sensitive to what it burns.
I don't have the slightest idea. Some people say it does, some say it doesn't. Some people fill with the cheapest one except once in a while when they say they want to "clean the engine" but I have no idea if they believe it actually does anything.
On the one hand, very few of the petrol stations in supermarkets (which, I think, is where most people fill up, and which are not branded -- or rather, not branded by a fuel company!) have any premium fuel (diesel or otherwise), which would tend to say it's not worth it (if there was a genuine benefit there would likely be a genuine demand for it and supermarkets would move to fill that demand!). OTOH, fuel brands (Shell, BP...) still have those premium diesels in (almost) all of their stations so there must be enough demand for it and given the price difference it must do something for people to buy it.
All I can say is that personally, the only time I ever buy those is for winter fuel.
-
@Zecc said in In other news today...:
@dcon said in In other news today...:
We (CA) do that too. But since ours is a special blend on top of that, when something breaks here, we're truly screwed. We can't just bring in (some other state's) fuel.
Because it causes cancer?
Also attracts rats.
-
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
My understanding is that diesel is not very sensitive to what it burns.
Modern diesel engines are more sensitive than older engines; they're tuned much more heavily (for emissions control reasons).
-
@remi said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
premium diesel (so really the most expensive...)
And is that “premium” diesel actually worth the extra money? My understanding is that diesel is not very sensitive to what it burns.
I don't have the slightest idea. Some people say it does, some say it doesn't. Some people fill with the cheapest one except once in a while when they say they want to "clean the engine" but I have no idea if they believe it actually does anything.
On the one hand, very few of the petrol stations in supermarkets (which, I think, is where most people fill up, and which are not branded -- or rather, not branded by a fuel company!) have any premium fuel (diesel or otherwise), which would tend to say it's not worth it (if there was a genuine benefit there would likely be a genuine demand for it and supermarkets would move to fill that demand!). OTOH, fuel brands (Shell, BP...) still have those premium diesels in (almost) all of their stations so there must be enough demand for it and given the price difference it must do something for people to buy it.
All I can say is that personally, the only time I ever buy those is for winter fuel.
I can't speak to the construction of diesel engines, but gasoline engines are designed to run at certain minimum octane levels, which do correspond to the different grades of gasoline.
Usually, cars with performance engines (so, essentially always performance cars) are the only ones that will benefit from higher grade gasoline, and you'll damage your engine if you use lower grade gas.
Non-performance cars/engines won't benefit from higher grade gasoline. Around here, all the gas stations (branded or not) offer high grade gasoline, but I'd bet 90-ish percent of the gas they sell is the low grade stuff.
-
@GuyWhoKilledBear The question was specifically about diesel, but if we talk gasoline, the premium fuels around here are not higher octane, I think. We do have different octanes that are sold as such (95 and 98), but there are also premium 98 (I don't think any brand does a premium 95 but since I don't buy any premium anyway, I never really paid attention). So what makes those fuels different is not octane.
-
@dkf said in In other news today...:
they're tuned much more heavily (for emissions control reasons).
Indeed
-
This post is deleted!
-
Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them.
When you thought Amazon couldn't get any more dystopian...
-
@topspin said in In other news today...:
When you thought Amazon couldn't get any more dystopian...
It's not the first place I've heard of with that sort of practice. And yes, the fix is indeed hiring people for the express purpose of getting rid of them shortly afterwards. I'm sure there are employment agencies who can advise on an efficient method. Heck, do it right and you can cycle through everyone in the country like this and implement a Universal Basic Income as a tax on Amazon's stupid HR policies.
-
@dkf said in In other news today...:
And yes, the fix is indeed hiring people for the express purpose of getting rid of them shortly afterwards.
Except if the leadership that wanted up-or-out to happen knew that fix was being applied AND understood why, they would... have been distracted by something else already BUT if they DID care, they would not like it.
-
@dkf said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
When you thought Amazon couldn't get any more dystopian...
It's not the first place I've heard of with that sort of practice. And yes, the fix is indeed hiring people for the express purpose of getting rid of them shortly afterwards. I'm sure there are employment agencies who can advise on an efficient method. Heck, do it right and you can cycle through everyone in the country like this and implement a Universal Basic Income as a tax on Amazon's stupid HR policies.
Suddenly I'm thinking that hacking the inane practices of megacorps shall be the indispensable defence science of the next decade.
-
@GOG said in In other news today...:
the
nextprevious 4 and all upcomingdecades.Supply-chain hacks require this (as well as small-company inanities) and are very not new.
-
A lot of companies (especially large ones) have some sort of turn-over quota based on "SCIENCE". So it completely makes sense to me for managers to hire fodder to save their more valued workers.
-
@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
... turn-over quota based on "SCIENCE". ...
Yes, in this case the science being invoked being, free-market capitalist economics with a zero-sum twist. If the motivation structure works it seems to work based on the Prisoner's Dilemma. Also, could not work also b/c Prisoner's Dilemma.
Since businesses don't tend to be zero-sum for real long, this doesn't help the company be more effective but it does assure that either the money goes up or it goes out.
ed. are you going to let him get away with that pinko agitation?
-
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
I can't speak to the construction of diesel engines, but gasoline engines are designed to run at certain minimum octane levels, which do correspond to the different grades of gasoline.
There is big difference between spark-ignition and compression-ignition engines. Spark-ignition engines compress the fuel-air mixture, so the fuel has to match the specification fairly closely, otherwise it can auto-ignite early, which will destroy the engine if it keeps going on for some time, or won't ignite properly.
But compression-ignition engines compress air to way over the fuel's auto-ignition temperature and then inject the fuel, which immediately bursts into flame. That has much greater tolerance for the fuel properties. Basically if it is viscous enough to lubricate the fuel pump—the pump must exceed the pressure in the piston at top dead centre and at that pressure the pumped fluid will push out any vaseline you'd use for lubrication, so it relies on the fuel itself being lubricating instead—you won't damage the engine. The fuel properties still affect the efficiency, but it's much less sensitive.
-
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other news today...:
I can't speak to the construction of diesel engines...
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
There is big difference between spark-ignition and compression-ignition engines.
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Spark-ignition engines compress the fuel-air mixture to a concentration and pressure considered optimal for explosion upon spark(, which is close to auto-ignition conditions), so the fuel has to match the specification fairly closely, otherwise it can auto-ignite early, which will destroy the engine if it keeps going on for some time, or won't ignite properly.
But compression-ignition engines compress air to way over the fuel's auto-ignition temperature and then inject the fuel, which immediately bursts into flame. That has much greater tolerance for the fuel properties. Basically if it is viscous enough to lubricate the fuel pump—the pump must exceed the pressure in the piston at top dead centre and at that pressure the pumped fluid will push out any vaseline you'd use for lubrication, so it relies on the fuel itself being lubricating instead—you won't damage the engine. The fuel properties still affect the efficiency, but it's much less sensitive.
This property is where all the crazy "I ran a diesel on..." stories come from.
-
Last year, the SA Civil and Administrative Tribunal (SACAT) found Mr Bhoola secretly and dishonestly altered the prescriptions of his business partners' patients on 410 occasions.
-
@Deadfast Isn't there a big case right now (admittedly quite old; it just only made it to the courts now) around here regarding doctors getting bribed to prescribe specific medications? I suppose that's why here too.
-
damaged form of the person’s native accent
This means war.
-
-
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
damaged form of the person’s native accent
This means war.
As long as she pronounces the Oxford comma correctly, I don't see the problem.
-
@boomzilla Using your real name on the internet?
-
@boomzilla hilarious, but sounds like an honest mistake. You don't type in your screen name every time and probably don't remember you typed in some dumb shit for meeting with pals when you have to enter a court zoom meeting.
-
@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
I installed Brave which worked for few weeks but then started to act just like Chrome.
The core problem is the modern web is pretty terrible in terms of being a resource hog. Fixing it basically requires dropping/disabling support for both CSS and Javascript. Which no modern browser lets you do.
Yeah, that's kind of like the opposite direction of where "the web" is going.
Cue some (justified) @Zenith rant about "hurr durr, don't use tables for layout they say, but then use
divscanvas for everything." Not sure if I'm misunderstanding how canvas works, but does that mean they have to re-implement even such trivial things as selecting text? I guess at least they'll make ad blocking next to impossible, so that's something.Soon enough they'll propose new garbage standards to solve problems that had been solved decades ago when the web wasn't the OS, like support for screen readers when everything is canvas based.
And then they'll finally bring you Chrome browser directly as a canvas-based web app, so you can eat RAM while you eat RAM.
-
@topspin said in In other news today...:
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding how canvas works, but does that mean they have to re-implement even such trivial things as selecting text?
I believe you are right. Canvas is just a raw drawing surface. So we'll soon have GUI frameworks for the canvas, because the two GUI frameworks the browser already has (the DOM renderer and the one for its own controls) are not enough.
@topspin said in In other news today...:
I guess at least they'll make ad blocking nex to impossible
Ad blocking is mostly based on intercepting the network requests and failing them, so fortunately it won't.
-
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Ad blocking is mostly based on intercepting the network requests and failing them, so fortunately it won't.
You funnel everything through Google (so you can't tell the individual data apart) and then render the garbage directly onto the canvas, so there's no DOM elemets you could block.
At least it'd make blocking harder.
-
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
So we'll soon have GUI frameworks for the canvas
Yes… but they'll mostly be about doing the event handling; the drawing API it exposes is pretty reasonable in as far as it goes (apart from being horribly inefficient in ever so many ways, but it's DOM/JS so that goes with the territory). If there was a way to allocate mouse events to which graphical object they're over without having to all that work, it'd be much easier. (Keyboard events would still be a fucking mess.)
-
@dkf The drawing API might be reasonable as much as it wants, but you still need a library of the elements like label, icon, button, entry box, table cell etc. It'll still basically have to do all the DOM renderer does.
-
@topspin said in In other news today...:
Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them.
When you thought Amazon couldn't get any more dystopian...
There's a reason I don't do business with Amazon. Not only is it a place I don't want to work, but I don't buy anything from them, either.
-
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@Deadfast Isn't there a big case right now (admittedly quite old; it just only made it to the courts now) around here regarding doctors getting bribed to prescribe specific medications? I suppose that's why here too.
This wasn't a case of him prescribing some more expensive lenses. They would have been the same cost and made by the same company. They just wouldn't fit the customer at all, making their vision worse instead of correcting it.
My only guess is that he was trying to gaslight his business partner into quitting and handing the whole business over to him.
-
-
This may be the day I lost my faith in everything.
-
-
-
Today in "How to lie (or at least mislead) with statistics":
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/austin-airport-sees-first-year-over-year-increase-in-passengers-since-pandemic-started/When you're comparing to almost none, it's not terribly hard to get an increase:
Next month's reported increase
will be huge.is gonna be YUGE!!!
-
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
Today in "How to lie (or at least mislead) with statistics"
That's just some dumb headline, but there are actually interesting consequences of a similar effect:
German retirement funds are coupled to the increase in average wages, basically as a way to adjust for inflation (or to adjust for general increase in wealth if average wages increase faster than inflation). But, for political reasons, pensions don't adjust down if the wages decrease. So guess what happens if you have a sharp drop in 2020 and a recovery in 2021? YUGE SAVINGS!Side note: if they had waited one month longer, the reported increase would be much higher than this.
-
Seems they got the efficiency to 77%, at least if you can get several doses:
-
-
@JBert said in In other news today...:
I can't wait for the kopi luwak aficionados to pick up on this....
-
@da-Doctah said in In other news today...:
I can't wait for the kopi luwak aficionados to pick up on this....
Make sure the animals' intestines are free from Corona viruses!
Otherwise you could get a shitty Covid experience with kopi luwak.
-
This explains a lot about some members of this forum
-
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
Any alcohol causes damage to the brain, study finds
CBA to check the study, but article talk only about drinking. So, other modes of consumption are ok?
Edit: Asking for a friend!
-
-
In other news:
Or if you don't want to watch the video
The Third Thumb is 3D-printed, making it easy to customise, and is worn on the side of the hand opposite the user’s actual thumb, near the little (pinky) finger. The wearer controls it with pressure sensors attached to their feet, on the underside of the big toes. Wirelessly connected to the Thumb, both toe sensors control different movements of the Thumb by immediately responding to subtle changes of pressure from the wearer.
Before and after the training, the researchers scanned participants’ brains using fMRI, while the participants were moving their fingers individually (they were not wearing the Thumb while in the scanner). The researchers found subtle but significant changes to how the hand that had been augmented with the Third Thumb (but not the other hand) was represented in the brain’s sensorimotor cortex.
-
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
This explains a lot about some members of this forum
"Whilst alcohol only made a small contribution to this (0.8%), it was a greater contribution than other 'modifiable' risk factors," she said, explaining that modifiable risk factors are "ones you can do something about, in contrast to aging."
So, no matter what the fuck you do, aging is gonna kill your brain. Seems more like "Drink alcohol, it doesn't matter much anyway."
-
@Zecc Do want.
Think of the advantages.
- 12 finger typing
- more expressive rude gestures
- extra thumb things shown in the video
Real question is ... do you go for an extra thumb now, or do you wait in hopes for more extra fingers or even an extra arm or two?
-
@cvi It seems to be about time for somebody to start making up the rules of ski-boxing.
-
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
So, no matter what the fuck you do, aging is gonna kill your brain. Seems more like "Drink alcohol, it doesn't matter much anyway."