Translation: I am uncomfortable with people different from me and I want to dictate how they live their lives, therefore I project upon those other people that they must want to do the same to me and all the world's decent people who are (of course) like me.

The size of vehicles around me in the US is absurd. I live in a pretty white & republican area, with a mix of rednecks in their compensators and temporarily embarassed billionaires in their 2-3 ton $100K luxury grocery getters.

I'm a big guy and I drive an old Mazda3 sedan that we've had for almost almost a decade and a half. It's what some Europeans might call a family car. It has fun driving dynamics which I care about and enjoy, though that seems to put me in a tiny minority. It's even practical enough that I have hauled home 8-foot lumber dozens of times with the back seats folded down, because I actually build shit unlike most of the truck drivers.

It sucks knowing all the SUVs with their rushed & distracted drivers weigh 50% more than my vehicle, sure. But the pickup trucks have become caricatures of themselves. I'm sure most folks in this community have seen the charts showing how terrible the forward-looking visibility is in modern pickups versus everything from older trucks to heavy construction equipment. It's like the number one feature driving sales is how fucking high off the ground they can get the hood/bonnet.

It's like driving around mobile buildings. The front grilles of these vehicles are just a vertical wall. And even for how large and high the entire bodies of these vehicles are, the new look seems to be having the hood/bonnet in the front sitting even higher than the edges of the bed in the back. I might think that automakers were in competition to see who could get the most customer's children run over, but I am all too familiar with our garbage culture where everything is a competition and every other person must fall on a spectrum somewhere between rival and mortal enemy.

Black holes can exist with any amount of mass, as far as we know. You can calculate the size of the event horizon for any given quantity of matter. IIRC, even the Planck Temperature is the limit to our current understanding that it is because a photon emitted by an object that hot would be energetic enough to form a little tiny black hole.

This graph shows a few things about black holes in a way that I love.

1. Black holes do have a lifetime and are not eternal. I think somebody already mentioned Hawking radiation.

2. Extremely small black holes actually have a pretty short lifespan. The math says they glow brightly and basically explode as they get close to fully evaporating.

3. Black holes with any appreciable mass last a REALLY fucking long time. A black hole with only the mass of the Red Sea or Greenland would last many orders of magnitude longer than the longest-lived red dwarfs, which themselves go for trillions of years. An online calculator tells me that the Schwarzschild radius for 10^20 kg (roughly greenland on the graph) is 1.4852e-7 m, so sub-micron in size. And though it will not last forever, it will still be virtually unchanged in trillions of years after every current star burns out.

I also hit up Wolfram Alpha's black hole lifetime calculator. For 10^20 kg it gives me 2.667 x 10^37 years. For one in the range of metric tons or less, you are looking at nanoseconds or faster. For a black hole to last longer than a second, you need to be up around a quarter of a million kilograms.

So when I said they are supposed to basically explode as they get tiny and evaporate? The most powerful hydrogen bombs convert a couple kg of matter to energy at most. A 250,000 kg black hole converting entirely to radiation in just a second must be some crazy shit.

Another story on the pile of "I'm a middle aged american and France was always the butt of the joke, yet they seem to have their heads on straighter than most places on the planet."

This made me image an exchange like

Agent 1: OK McNulty, you have finished your forensic scan of that scumbag's computer. I can't wait to hear whether we are taking this monster down for espionage, stealing classified information, or even just another copyright infringement case. What is really in that folder of "Linux ISOs?"

Agent 2: You are not gonna believe this...

I just stumbled into this discussion, but it seems to me like you were the one to introduce extremism when you took an ideology and called yourself the "polar opposite" of it.

ID for voting is pushed in order to discourage certain demographics from voting.

ID for grocery discounts is NOT pushed in order to discourage certain demographics from feeding themselves.

Yeah but can you imagine the humiliation if it didn't work and he accidentally just saved millions of lives without getting rid of 100.0% of the problem?

This would hit a lot harder for me if I didn't spend the last decade watching a disturbing fraction of the population not just vote for, but vocally support and make a part of their personality, one of the worst people on the planet. (edit: you know, the "greater of two evils.")

I'm in the US, of course.

I actually used to do single dots in my own file/folder names. It's probably my favorite way visually, since it's a minimal separator and as you showed it works without a separator at all.

oh yeah. There are numerous benefits to the format itself, outside the question of hyphens vs slashes.

I find the sortability quite satisfying, but also as somebody living in the US, I also like that it's unambiguous regardless of my audience. Hell, half the time I see people hand-write a date on something they don't even use a year.

Oh they'll give "answers" alright. They could just be wrong or untethered from reality.