K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@freemo Huh. I thought air was an extremely good insulator up until breakdown voltage. In fluid dynamics we treat it as a near-perfect insulator unless we're at very high temperatures (e.g. rocket exhaust, reentry heating) where it starts to get weird ionic species in its composition, or actively breaking it down with high voltage.

@freemo Something seems off in his narration. The ring at the edge of the Petri dish is explicitly set to a negative voltage, while the wire hanging over its centre is described as having a "large voltage" and notated positive. But he then goes on to say "electrons get sprayed down to the ball bearings in the dish." If anything, they should be getting sucked up into the wire, right?

But I don't even think that's the whole story. There's a couple points in the first demo where electrons actually do start flowing, and the arc is easily visible. In normal operation, I think he electrically polarises the air without an appreciable quantity of electrons travelling in either direction.

@kayden @Pixificial there are a couple things going on.

Favourites are kind of a bookmarking feature as well as a way to show approval. My list of favourite toots is useless if I just use it to mean "okay, I saw your message" the way it's used on other platforms. So in the case where I do that, I usually remove those trivial ones some days later. You can ask, "Who favourited this toot?" but not, "What toots has this user favourited?" except regarding yourself. Boosts don't have this limitation. The dedicated bookmark feature is a much more recent addition and hasn't had as much time to influence how people use the platform.

Many interfaces don't show favourites unless you click for details on the post, or if they do, it just shows "1+" instead of an accurate count. The stated reasoning for this is to make it easier for people who struggle with addiction to online validation. Boosts, on the other hand, are always sent to your followers (although they have the option to hide them) and appear on the profile page, so they're a lot more visible. If you regularly boost interesting content, it's almost as valuable as authoring it yourself in terms of how desirable your feed becomes, so it gains you more followers.

@soundwave clever!

@bonifartius Yeah the extensions are really what pushed me to ditch Firefox some years back. There's also Waterfox, which comes in Current or Classic flavours depending on whether you prioritise the Quantum engine (present in Current) or the old-style extensions (present in Classic). As far as I know the two are incompatible and mutually exclusive, so a browser that has both is not possible. It's Gecko on the backend too.

@bonifartius Pale Moon or Basilisk? Both use the Goanna engine.

@valleyforge even with the correct screwdriver, I'm not gonna outmuscle the guy who torqued it in at the factory using a pneumatic tool, and added loctite to boot. Especially if it has a Philips head.

@freemo could be - I don't *remember* it coming up when I worked in Pennsylvania, but I can't guarantee it didn't. In any case, if I had to show immunity to MMR, hep, *and covid* the difference is too insignificant to bother me much.

Thanks for discussing this civilly, by the way - I know that *should* be the norm among adults, but it's unfortunately not that common in practice.

@freemo Both Ohio

@freemo I guess. I thought it was normal, actually - just checked with my gf (also not in healthcare) and she had to as well.

@freemo Ohio. I didn't have to for my previous job in Pennsylvania though, as far as I remember.

@freemo Off the top of my head, I was required to show measles, mumps, rubella, and hepatitis vaccines for my job (fluid dynamics research, has no medical relation at all). I didn't have "passports" for any of those, but I think I got a doctor's note? I might have just had to sign an affadvit or something; I've forgotten the details. And it's an indirect requirement for many flights, at least internationally - because an airline won't board you without a proper visa, and vaccines for things like yellow fever are widely (though not universally) required.

About the only new thing here is the idea that a business might require its customers to show proof - I think that's stupid, but hey let the free market show them when they lose the customers. Unless Biden starts requiring businesses to require their customers to show proof, I still think the alarm is unwarranted.

@freemo [Here](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/03/29/p)'s the primary source:

Relevant quotes:

> [A] determination or development of a vaccine passport, or whatever you want to call it, will be driven by the private sector.

> [T]here will be no centralized, universal federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.

It looks like it'll be up to the individual to prove he's vaccinated in some way that's acceptable to his school or employer - which is pretty much how measles or hepatitis or whatever already works. I don't think it's quite the cause for alarm it sounded like initially.

@freemo Are you sure about this? Of the three general news sources I normally consume, two (which I would've expected to support the president) have no coverage of this at all, and the third (which I would've expected to criticise the president) is carrying a statement from the White House Press Secretary which denies that the administration is creating vaccination passports.

I think it's much more likely they'll treat it like other vaccines anyway - your school or employer or whatever can require you to document that you're vaccinated against measles, for example, but there is no national "measles passport" everyone's required to have.

@gawrsh Math seems off in calculating the ratios. McDonald's is 563:1; Papa John's is 961:1 as I run the numbers. Intuitively it doesn't make sense that the McDonald's ratio is nearly 2x higher given that they report both a lower executive salary and higher median salary.

I take it the median is dragged down because these companies mostly employ part timers? Even at current US national minimum wage, those medians aren't close to the 2000 hours per year a full time employee puts in.

@freemo

I don't think this particular post is banworthy. He's not soliciting, and he's not trying to incite others, so even if he comes out and says "I *don't* oppose such interactions and I think they should be legalised" it's just "unpopular opinions voiced respectfully" which are explicitly allowed by our rules.

The problem as I see it is that he's out of place on a STEM server like QOTO. His entire timeline is about pedophilia; nearly everyone he talks to is on NNIA. He's here to talk about his sexuality, not science, but without being subject to NNIA's restrictions on what can be said on the subject.

@miamiautumn Regardless of what decision the mods arrive at, it might be wise to start hunting for a new home on the Fediverse where you're willing to participate in the local community. If you do this sooner rather than later, you'll be able to port your followers over. If you wait to get banned, you'll lose that option.

@arteteco @Sphinx

@casualwp

> ... using it commonly as a medium of exchange is pretty important. It’s just that even from that perspective I don’t quite get the argument.

It's the same argument, really, because loans are some of the most economically important exchanges in terms of dollar value. Bitcoin might operate in certain niches (and to be fair to @Aurelius_17_6_313, I don't think it's "failed" yet - the experiment is ongoing) but the fact that it is deflating is a good reason not to expect it to be useful in the rest of the economy.

> I’m not entirely convinced that
> i) interest rates in a free market won’t converge to where people are willing to lend anyway

Interest rates converge to where people are willing to lend *and borrow*. The upper limit for the borrower (appreciation of the business) has to be greater than the lower limit for the lender (appreciation of the currency) for such a point to exist. Very little of the economy is at that point wrt Bitcoin.

> ii) making a startup do better than deflation when currency is deflationary is significantly harder than making it do better than inflation in the current world.

These mean slightly different things. "Doing better than inflation" means keeping your *real* growth above zero; "doing better than deflation" means keeping your *denominated* growth above zero. The degree to which the one is harder than the other corresponds to the degree to which real growth outstrips denominated growth; i.e. the rate of deflation. Whether that's "significant" is a judgement call, although with Bitcoin deflation as high as it's been this winter, I don't really think it's reasonable to conclude otherwise.

@Aurelius_17_6_313

> must be used commonly as a medium of exchange

That's kind of the point of a currency though, so it's a reasonable assumption that's the goal of something that purports to be a crypto-currency. If bitcoin fans called it a crypto-asset or something instead and stopped trying to push it as an alternative to fiat currency, people would probably stop pointing out why it sucks in that role.

@casualwp

The argument is that a deflating currency discourages investment if loans are denominated in it. Only investments that appreciate faster than the currency make financial sense. So the economy suffers because value-generating enterprises can't get startup capital if the bankers would rather sit on the money than lend it out.

@homeomnis I've since played with it a bit more, mainly on the first level as there seems to be much more to do there. I use Pale Moon, a Firefox derivative, and the sound works but occasionally crackles.

It might be nice to offer a right-click that places the planet on an orbit with the same perihelion and apihelion as the left click, but oriented so it lies in the plane of the screen. I've been able to achieve this a couple times by placing two that orbit at right angles and getting them to interact so one is flung in an oblique direction, but it's difficult to do so with any precision. Having all three dimensions available opens up more possibilities to explore the physics.

I believe I've noticed one bug. Orbital radius and planetary surface radius seem to get out of sync, so under some conditions the smaller body appears to "pop through" the larger body. This most frequently occurs in binary star systems or when a planet has a moon. I *think* what might be happening is that the planet is drawn larger as it approaches the screen, but perspective isn't accounted for when plotting the coordinates of any moons orbiting it, so the apparent orbital radius stays fixed.