That’s why electroconvulsive therapy uses pulses of about a millisecond. But, then, it’s not actually turning the power off, ECT is more of a warm reset of consciousness.

I find it easy to switch back and forth between the two color combinations: If I assume that the scene is in full sun, then the dress looks blue and black. If I assume that it’s in the shade, but with a brightly-lit background, then it looks white and gold.

I’m no expert on whether it’s codified as a work safe practice, nor am I out to convince anybody to get on such a rig. For what it’s worth, I’m just sharing what I’ve learned as a sailor, and what I see here is a lot of folks certain that this is crazy because of their intuition that it’ll tip over easily. With that it of the way…

Based on my intuition, there was simply no way a 747 could even toodle around the tarmac, much less fly, just by blowing some air out the back. Big ones weigh 500 tons! Then, I learned the power of air and lift intimately by putting a specially-shaped piece of Dacron up a metal pole on top of a boat. Experience updated my intuition, and I’m not even slightly nervous about flying anymore.

Similarly, from the other direction, my intuition said that there’s no way a boat could stay upright with parts (mast, cabin, tuna tower, stacks of containers, water park and shopping mall deck, etc.) so high above the waterline, and so little hull beneath it. But I’ve learned intimately the effects of primary stability, and ballast. With my intuition changed, this setup looks fine.

I’ve had the experience, too, of working in a boat yard. At the end of the season, the owner drove the crawler crane onto a barge not much bigger than the one in the image, and we used it to yank boat mooring anchors out of the lake bed. Even a heavy weight on the end of the crane boom barely affected the trim of the barge. I’ve walked on many an EZ Dock section, and experienced that sections like this have immense primary stability, too.

Indeed, by my back of the envelope calculations, that 20’ by 20’ EZ Dock barge would take in the rough range of 75 tons of force to capsize. (Easier to submerge it!) Even with the 32’ lever arm of the scissor lift, that’s still more than 7 tons of lateral force needed to capsize it. I don’t know the numbers on what it takes to capsize the scissor lift itself, but given that I know that the barge is going to stay quite level, and that there’s no lateral force on the scissor lift platform in this scenario, it seems that they’d be fine even without the straps lashing the lift to the barge.

Anyway, I did a reverse image search, and did not find an original source. I have no idea how common this is, but I did find a comment thread from 4 years ago on the red site with comments from a user who said he called a local company that rents out Rotodocks (a very similar product) which claimed that they do it all the time.

Hope that is interesting, and yeah, absolutely, get the numbers from a real engineer before putting yourself in situations like this.

EZ Dock is the brand name, and the company even markets its products for use as floating work platforms.

EZ Dock Floating Work Platforms

The manufacturer markets them for carrying equipment.

Okay, no Linux, no Star Trek. Cool cool. But you’re a femboy furry, right?

My niece has been getting heavily into skincare. As long as we’re being honest, most of a typical “skincare routine” is placebo, and some of it is actively counter-productive. I know a few women who have a laissez-faire approach to skincare, and their results are almost as good. I believe that the routine is more about the ritual, and psychic need to try to gain some measure of control in a crazy society, than results.

Just having fun taunting sea lions.

So you’re not actually worried that people want to harm you for being a CEO. There’s the answer.

If it’s your business, change your title to something other than CEO. Problem solved!

98% true.

(The other 2% is historic districts and college towns.)

It’s kind of the natural result, because cars are good for:

• navigating a landscape designed to exclude anything but cars
• conspicuous consumption
• identity signaling

And they’re really bad for:

• people
• the environment
• transportation

Do an honest evaluation, and “don’t use cars” is the inevitable conclusion.

That’s locality of reference, though, similar to how you can say “here” or “there” for spatial coordinates. Everybody is aware of the year and month, so you omit it as given. The order of significance is still year, month, day.

Imagine if a harried time traveler jumped out of their time machine and asked you the date. Would it make sense to say, “Why, it’s the 1st.” (Or more possible, if a friend awoke from a coma.) If you ask somebody when they were born, most people will give the year at minimum. Of course, there are some weirdos out there, and you recognize them when you ask when they were born, and they say, “on a Tuesday.” Same for the date of the Norman invasion of Great Britain. If you don’t already have some sense of history, then knowing it happened about the 20th isn’t very edifying.

Sorry, I’m not in a position to know. It would be very interesting if an investigative journalist looked into the state of employment from the perspective of workers these days to put together a bigger picture than one store.

The grocery store in which I used to work has been desperate to hire cashiers for years, really since the start of the pandemic. There were some days that we had only two lanes open because that’s all the staff that we had. During busy times, the store manager, the store owners, and sometimes the managers-on-duty would go up to the front to do check-out. The store installed more self-checkout lanes out of necessity.

Nowadays, I go shop there only in the evenings, and there are enough cashiers because they’re all high school students. But the help-wanted sign at the front of the store is still offering open cashier jobs. They’re certainly not eliminating jobs that people desperately need.

Computer-vision has been a thing for years, though it’s now bundled under the moniker “AI”. I know that the self-checkout cameras at the store where I go use AI to “watch” customers. I would assume most of them do, now. Heck, the cheap camera that I bought to point out my front window for fun pretty reliably detects animals, vehicles, and people.

The store nearest my house, where I shop a lot, is a bit more upscale. They’ve installed fancy self-checkout kiosks that tell you to continue scanning items while waiting for the attendant to come deal with an issue. The giant, discount grocery store with locations on the edge of town have enough room that they’ve installed self-checkout lanes that have about a 2-meter conveyor belt to a large bagging area. It’s enormous.

Good comment, but this bugs me:

*Reagan

Regan was Reagan’s chief of staff for his last couple of years in office.

I like the metaphor of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam in the cold water a mile from shore. He’s losing body heat, and eventually hypothermia will set in and he will drown. But if he lets go and starts to swim for shore, he’ll lose body heat even faster, use up his energy, and he probably won’t make it. The “harm reduction” argument says that he should reduce his heat loss, and stay clinging to the flotsam. He’s safe right now, while attempting to get to shore is difficult and dangerous.

Of course, by the time that the fallacy of that strategy becomes apparent (*gestures at current events*), he’s too cold and weak to even attempt the swim.

In my city, we have a barely-there progressive, third party with a presence in the city and county government. It’s all that remains of an attempt to in the 1990’s to launch a Midwestern political party based on an electoral reform called “fusion voting,” which would allow a candidate to get the endorsement of multiple parties, and appear on the ballot multiple times as a candidate under each of those party banners. That way, the candidate would know where their support came from, without the “spoiler effect.” I learned from the Wikipedia page that it was an important tactic in the movement to abolish slavery.

But, in this case, the Democratic Party (technically, the Democratic Farm Labor Party) went to court to shoot down that idea, arguing that it was too confusing to voters. The American left isn’t just sitting here waiting for someone to start a revolution, it has two major political parties actively suppressing it.

Amusingly, one tidbit of information that I just now learned from that Wikipedia article, presented without further comment:

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the heyday of the sewer socialists, the Republican and Democratic parties would agree not to run candidates against each other in some districts, concentrating instead on defeating the socialists. These candidates were usually called non-partisan, but sometimes were termed fusion candidates instead.