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Maybe this is silly to complain about, but how would power companies charge these drone companies for electricity consumption? Seems… just so easy to steal?

When I was a kid, we had a neighbor who had somehow wrapped some wire around the power lines enough times to siphon off an interesting amount of power. I never saw the wire myself, so it might not have actually happened. But people certainly talked about doing it way back when.

We had a neighbor that put loops of wire under a 600kV line and got enough power to run a water pump for cows. The square law makes that kind of thing pretty low-return.

The Mythbusters also tried it in the "Free Energy" episode. They pretty much said extracting any useful amount of energy is not worth the effort.

Here's some calculations on the return [0] (usual caveats of stuff found on the internet). Quite low returns indeed!

[0] https://user.physics.unc.edu/~deardorf/phys25/rwp/exam1rwpso...


The proposed initial use case is use as inspection drones for the power company themselves.

I love iNat, and I think it has a lot of real-world value. Others seem to have a better understanding than me, but from a purely anecdotal perspective, there was a huge prairie dog colony encroaching on housing. For years, nobody did anything about it. I documented it on iNat (for fun), and within a month they were relocated safely. How cool!

Why do you recommend Seek? I’ve been using the iNat app (though since it was released, they’ve been asking me to upgrade to the newer app) and it seems fine. Take a picture or upload an existing one, get recommendations for ID, then upload to the community for further consensus!

Seek is annoying, because it throws up some kind of „please don‘t disturb nature“ dialog box every time you start it to take a photo. I hve seen that warning hundreds of times, why can‘t i disable it after a few confirmations?

I‘ve moved to the main iNaturalist app, and it does everything Seek does, but better and it’s generally also faster.


Huh? So your complaint is that you keep getting black doctors? That’s dumb, but whatever - why not just… get a white doctor? Or Asian or whatever you think is the smart one?

This is where their perspective comes from: https://www.thecollegefix.com/med-schools-still-accept-black...

This has been going on for 20 years: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120616/

Black students (among other minorities) with unacceptable MCAT (as in, if another race had them they would be rejected) are accepted, at a rate 6-10x more likely to be admitted with similar scores. The motivation is that doctors should match the demographic they treat, and minority doctors are underrepresented, so should be accepted at higher rates: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/clinical-outcomes-pa...

The obvious outcome is that minorities students, being less prepared as measured by MCAT and somewhat setup for failure, have a much higher failure rate, with black students being 85% more likely to leave medical school than white: https://news.yale.edu/2023/07/31/black-md-phd-students-exper...

USMLE scores have been changed to pass/fail, to hide the actual score, to help prevent rejection of minority students who previously would have been rejected: https://n-age.org/wp-content/uploads/A-Test-of-Diversity-—-W... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00904...

The system was, as is the stated goal by all, setup to pass minority students that would have previously been rejected, at every step of them becoming a doctor, to provide a net positive for minority populations, since it's accepted that you'll get the best outcome if your doctor is the same race as you.


Thank you, this is it exactly. And my biggest concern isn't the % of unprepared students who leave medical school. It's the % who stay and get passed through.

"You know what they call the most unqualified insert-identity-here person in the med school class of 2025 who squeezed by because it would look bad if they didn't?"

"Dr."

Which is why 99% AI-driven diagnosis can't come fast enough.


I feel like only the last paragraph was relevant here - I don’t particularly care why he wants a doctor of race X instead of Y. My question remains the same: why not just… get a doctor with the skin color you prefer? You’re not exactly assigned one for life at birth.

I think you're bringing up a different (very related) point than him, with both points having truth:

1. You're free to pick the race of your doctor. Matching your race is a data driven positive.

2. 30 years ago, the system made sure a minority doctor was (at least, but probably more so do to discrimination) as competent as a white doctor. These days, the system is intentionally and deliberately set up so to help pass less competent minority students, due to the positives of #1.

It's a mushy relative thing.


Because nobody else changed the food pyramid to be somewhat not-garbage until him. Who else would you congratulate for this specific action? Your own personal doctor??

Michelle Obama provided very similar guidance in around 2011 and every conservatively collectively lost their shit over it.

The food pyramid wasn't really used in recent years by the US government, and changed to "MyPlate" in 2011, and if you actually read its guidelines nothing on there is terribly offensive.


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I remember people calling it a "Nanny State".

I post this elsewhere but:

I have not seen the pyramid with bread, cereal, rice and pasta at the base pushed for at least ~20 years. Maybe it was 25-30 years ago when I saw it pushed seriously in school and even then I did not see people taking it seriously outside of those lessons, as in people actively calling it questionable.

Where in the world was this old pyramid still being pushed?


We haven't had a food pyramid for like twenty years. Yes, other people have "changed the food pyramid to be somewhat not-garbage" before RFK.

> Because nobody else changed the food pyramid to be somewhat not-garbage until him.

The food pyramid hasn't been a thing for more than a decade. He did bring it back.

> Who else would you congratulate for this specific action?

The people who pushed for stuff like this more than a decade ago, but conservatives opposed it because it was done by a black lady.


It's a pretty straight-forward question - you can just say "Michelle Obama" or whoever you're referring to instead. I never understand the desire to actively present yourself as someone throwing a tantrum.

If that's not who you're referring to, please correct me.


You made a claim about how RFK Jr. was the only person to fix the food pyramid.

It is unlikely that if you are old enough to vote that you do not remember that Michelle Obama tried to make a more healthy food criteria, and as such it’s very easy to assume that you are acting in bad faith when you say something about RFK Jr that is objectively not true.


It’s a pretty bad assumption. You should pay a lot more attention to Hanlon’s Razor.

I don’t know much at all about Michelle’s actions. Similarly, I don’t know much about Melania’s actions. You say she tried to - so… she didn’t do it? If not, I don’t see how this makes my comment “objectively untrue”?


Well if it’s based on weight, and one of the steps is to reduce the weight significantly…

Point being someone eating a couple bags of jerky over a workday would probably count as having eaten literal pounds of beef, despite consumed weight being much lower. Water is noncompressible and makes your stomach full very quickly.


> Point being someone eating a couple bags of jerky over a workday would probably count as having eaten literal pounds of beef

For the purposes of this conversation, about the nutritional effect of your diet, that seems like a fair way to put it.


Fungus in general is not well-understood at all. We didn't even realize until a few decades ago that it's pretty much the backbone of life on Earth. All of our research into it is highly specific (using fungi as chemical factories in pharmacology, for instance), but besides that, it's largely a very mysterious branch of life. In medical school, you learn about fungus as it pertains to a few common infections and some classes of drugs, but otherwise you don't hear much.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's just not something they're willing to speak on professionally because it's a huge blind-spot for science.


Let’s be realistic.

Not easy to find one man in a haystack. Guerrilla warfare has always been insanely overpowered as a defense tactic anyways, as are terrorist attacks.

The US can realistically only be challenged militarily by Europe or Asia, assuming a unified continent, and the US is on the offensive. If it’s defensive, the US might put up a good fight against the rest of the planet.


So if you wanted to attack the US you wouldn’t do a conventional “red dawn” style attack. You’d attack like bin laden. And then keep quiet.

Normally I’d say the most effective way to attack a western country would be to target kids in school playgrounds, but the US seems that regularly anyway so it would be lost in noise. Perhaps target Amazon delivery centres with drones will strike fear into the true heart of America.


That probably wouldn't work. Even if you tried, there are more privately owned guns than there are citizens in the US; every inch would be a nightmare.

Your second paragraph doesn't even make sense, but I'm thinking you just wanted to hop on the "america bad" train for a moment, so maybe it doesn't matter.


“I don’t like my political candidate” is nothing even remotely similar to “I can’t vote”

Yes, blue is different than red, that is true enough. I mean, functionally I have zero representation, but theoretically anything is possible.

That's explicitly not true. The vast majority of your life is managed by much more local politicians where your vote matters a lot more. Not to mention, if the only time you vote is once it's "red vs. blue", you've missed the primaries, which is your chance to say which red or blue you want to see up there.

Having been involved with local governments and served on city council committees, my experience has been that they literally only care about things that are legible to them. If I have an idea about parking or a preference for landscaping, they are pretty responsive. If I want them to remove flock cameras they tell me I am a crank. And all the canidated running feel the same way.

But honesty, national politics are very local for me.

Because you can answer this question, maybe:

in what way did my vote in rural Colorado effect -any- election at -any- level in a way that I could have avoided this situation where I go to weekly protests against ICE?

Cause, hoss, I hate this shit. There is literally -nothing- more that I would love to believe than I could just, like, vote for a better local school board.

I am almost 50 and I am in the streets with kids because I know for a fact that mass deportations which started under Obama are the root of what we are seeing.

Or how about this:

literally what voting action have I have taken that makes me responsible for the two children who were kidnapped from my community by ICE, for whose sake I got pepper sprayed by DHS Federal Police and ICE, and who we were unable to prevent from being stolen.

Because while I feel culpable for not following up on all actions that I had at hand, I don't think that it was voting that led the feds to assault me and 20 of my comrades.

So you're smart- tell me how my vote caused that in a way that I can "do better next time".


I think this is almost certainly true. People aren’t built to be acceptable to an audience the size of a football stadium, they’re built to be acceptable to a hundred or so people at a time. If you can comfortably context-switch, it’s probably a much easier lifestyle.

I know that for me, at least, I like having one server where the comedy is not PC, one server where people seem to be a little more philosophical, one server for my real life friends, one server full of leftoids and one server full of rightards, etc.


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