It wouldn’t be a 30% higher electrical bill overall. It would be 30% more for whatever power you’re using for this specific device, which, if it’s ordinarily 10W while in sleep and an average 100W while in use, and you use it 50 hours per week, or 215 hours per month, that’s a baseline power usage of 21500 watt hours in use and 5050 watt hours from idle/sleep/suspend. Or a total of 26550 watt hours, or 26.5 kWh. At 20 cents per kWh, you’re talking about $5.30 per month in electricity for the computer. A 30% increase would be an extra $1.60 per month.

That wasn’t the real Tesla, though. It was actually the Goblin King.

Many kid movies raise some troubling implications about personhood and moral agency with anthropomorphized non-human characters (Toy Story and life/death/abandonment, what do obligate carnivores in Zootopia eat, etc.).

But Bee Movie inexplicably just dives right into it instead of leaving it unexplored on the edges. If the bees are fully intelligent beings with rich inner experiences, what moral obligation do we owe them? It’s a mess of a concept.

Human life absolutely factors into predicted lawsuit losses. Wrongful death lawsuits are expensive.

but I feel like people in union jobs making enough of a salary to buy a comfortable home is going to drive up wages for everyone

Even if that is an effect where increased unionized non-supervisor wages push up supervisor salaries, my point is that there are simply fewer middle managers to benefit from that effect.

Plus the second order effects of a hollowed out middle choking out the pipeline for promoting and training future business leaders, so that it’s a small number of big corporate executives overseeing jobs they’ve never had instead of the older system of a lot more small and medium sized business leaders supervising jobs they used to personally work.

I don’t think the McAllisters were in union jobs. I think they were pretty high up the tier of management.

People talk about union jobs going away, but don’t forget, non-unionized middle management has totally been gutted by outside consultants over the same time period. So the changes in the workforce have hurt the earning power of both the line workers and the middle managers who used to make up the middle class.

Let other people enjoy their preferences. Some people get very particular about console/IDE fonts, keyboard switches, T-shirt fabric blends, fork shape, guitar string material, etc. Others like fashion and style. Some like architecture and interior design. Let people enjoy things, and get deep in the weeds on minute differences if they want to.

I’ve set up workarounds in my own life. Elsewhere in this thread there’s people talking about forgetting to pay bills, versus bill pay. That’s what I’ve done (and in some instances, have reminders on my phone set up to periodically remind me to do the things that can’t be automated).

I’ve also steered my social relationships and my career to be more accommodating of my brain. I’m with a wife who doesn’t mind (and in some ways finds it endearing), and can help me fill in some gaps. I have a career where jumping around from topic to topic helps me seem well rounded, and where occasionally showing how I’ve done a deep dive into something persuades my colleagues that I’ve got great attention to detail (I do, but only on some things).

My ADHD might be the same as it’s always been, but my life has been set up so that it’s all low consequences. The guardrails and safety nets are in place, and I can just be.

I can’t answer for dual numbers, but I can answer for imaginary numbers in circuit design.

Imaginary numbers are those that include an imaginary component, that squares into a negative number. Traditionally, i^2 = -1, but electrical engineers like to use j instead (I tends to be a variable used to describe electrical current).

Complex numbers, that include a real component and an imaginary component, can be thought of as having an “angle,” based on how much of it is imaginary and how much of it is real, mapped onto a 2-dimensional representation of that number’s real and imaginary components. 5 + 5j is as real as it is imaginary, so it’s like having a 45° angle. The real number 5 is completely real, so it has a 0° angle.

Meanwhile, in alternating current (AC) circuits, like what you get from your wall outlet, the voltage source is a wave that alternates between a maximum peak of positive voltage and a bottom trough of negative voltage, in a nice clean sinusoidal shape over time. If you hook up a normal resistor, the nice clean sinusoidal voltage also becomes a nice clean sinusoidal current with the exact same timing of when the max voltage matches up with the max current.

But there’s also capacitors, which accumulate charge so that the flow of current on the other side depends on its own state of charge. And there are inductors, that affect current based on the amount of energy stored magnetically. These react to the existing current and voltage in the system and manipulate the time relationship between what moment in time a peak current will happen and when the peak voltage was.

And through some interesting overlap in how adding and subtracting and delaying sinusoidal waves works, the circuit characteristics line up perfectly with that complex angle I was talking about, with the imaginary numbers. So any circuit, or any part of a circuit, can be represented with an “impedance” that has both an imaginary and real component, with a corresponding phase angle. And that complex number can be used to calculate information about the time delay in the wave of current versus the wave of voltage.

So using complex phase angles makes certain AC calculations much, much easier, to represent the output of real current from real voltage, where the imaginary numbers are an important part of the calculation but not in the actual real world observation itself.

So even though we start with real numbers and end with real numbers, having imaginary numbers in the toolbox make the middle part feasible.

Set phasors to “confuse”

The 787 has 8 main tires and 2 nose tires. The main tires are 218 lbs (about 100kg) and the nose tires are 114 lbs (about 50kg). So a set is roughly 1970 lbs/900kg, pretty close to a short ton. 5 metric tonnes would be about 5.6 sets of 787 tires.

Lazard is a pretty respected analyst for energy costs. Here’s their report from June 2024.

In the U.S., peaker gas plants that are only fired up between 5-20% of the time, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is between $110 to $230 per MWh. The levelized cost of storage for utility scale 4-hour storage ranges from $124-$226 per MWh, after subsidies. Before subsidies, that 4-hour storage costs $170-$296.

Residential storage, on the other hand, doesn’t come close. That’s $882 to $1101 before subsidies, or $653 to $855 after subsidies.

So in other words, utility scale storage has dropped down to around the same price as gas peaker plants, in the U.S., after subsidies.

Yeah, people are working on it.

The EIA estimates that there’s about 30 GW of battery capacity in the U.S., mostly in storage systems that are designed to store about 1-4 hours worth.

That’s in comparison to 1,200 GW of generation capacity, or 400 times as much as there is storage.

It’s coming along, but the orders of magnitude difference between real-time supply and demand and our capacity for shifting some of the power just a few hours isn’t quite ready for load balancing across a whole 24 hour day, much less for days-long weather patterns or even seasonality across the year. We’re probably gonna need to see another few years of exponential growth before it starts actually making a big impact to generation activity.

Not exactly. “Mass timber” is a newer construction material made from wood, but put together in a way suitable for tall buildings, including structural elements for skyscrapers. Currently, the tallest timber skyscraper is the 25-story Ascent MKE building in Milwaukee.

The fire safety challenges are real, though. It’s just that timber as a building material has different characteristics. It’s under a lot of study from fire safety researchers, as they work out the tradeoffs and how to best mitigate the weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

And it’s not all bad. Timber is actually stronger than steel at high heat, and the beams don’t contain voids that allow fire and flames to travel along the structural elements as steel or concrete elements might. So the key is that the engineers need to design things with the timber’s properties in mind.

Why aren’t those windows aligned with each other, this is very upsetting.

not someone you wanna prone bone anyway

I actually laughed out loud at the specificity here. Thank you for this, you’ve brightened my day.

Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World were successful enough that people forget that they originated as SNL sketches. And, because they were the first, they kept on trying.

The category as a whole isn’t exactly very impressive, as movies.

But the originating sketches that developed the characters were…fine.

It’s Pat, the movie, was a notorious commercial bomb, and sold basically no tickets.

It was made, though, because the recurring SNL sketch was popular enough to attract the investment.

You guys are getting diagnosed?!?

It’s immunotherapy that prevents the cancers from deactivating the immune cells that would ordinarily kill the cancer cells. So it’s like a traditional vaccine in that it causes changes to the immune system to better equip it to fight disease, but it’s a pretty new methodology of accomplishing that.