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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Fun story, my car had a recall for the brake light coming on randomly. After they replaced the part, then the brake light wouldn’t come on at all. Then they made it so the brake light would only sometimes come on. I said screw it and finally fixed it myself. The pedal pushed down on two different things, one to actually operate the brakes, and a separate little button for the electronic brake indication for the lights and for the cruise control to disengage (the cruise control also stayed active even when hitting the brake pedal).

    Anyway, they screwed up setting the electronic button and I had to position it correctly in the little bracket, where it gets pressed if the brake pedal barely moves even if it takes a smidge of actual distance to start the real braking.



  • Yeah, that graph scale is absurd for comparison… I get it, they want to highlight the ‘trend’ but the scale of the US graph is nothing but a neglible slice of the boottom of the China graph, it’s just impossible to intelligently compare the ‘trends’ in that manner…

    Also skeptical of a claim of 0.0% for anyone. It looks to me that, by the criteria of the graph, china has managed to effectively tie the US on this sort of metric, and the US has roughly held it flat for the last 30 years.

    As others point out, this particular metric may not be a good one, and depending on how you slice the other metrics, either China or US technically comes out ahead, but broadly a more comparable standard of living.


  • I guess their point is if you exclude the upper half, China has managed to fare better.

    Basically if we torture the numbers either side can get them to say whatever that side wants, by cherry picking criteria or excluding certain portions of the population.

    Which is frankly a fantastic outcome for China, where in the past there was no way to make the numbers even close, now things are close enough as to each side being able to point out a way of measuring which makes them look better.


  • But the reason for the expense is largely the weight.

    Yes we can at great expense support massive weights. But even in skyscrapers, you aren’t expecting to just cram every floor with equipment that weighs over a ton and supported by less than a square meter of floor.

    It’s not just armchair engineering, i work in the industry and commonly you have racks preferring the ground floor and weight restrictions going up and even marked paths that the racks need to stay on when on upper floors due to limitations of the reinforcements.

    Skyscrapers are largely impractical structures done for the sake of showing off, with any value based on keeping people close to each other. No one builds a skyscraper by itself miles from anything else. This is where they build the datacenters because they don’t need proximity.