• 12 Posts
  • 115 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2024

help-circle
  • Fair; I guess I should have run some data. I just used gasbuddy.com to run a similar track for what would have been my rather lengthy commute if my employer had asked us to return to office (and kept the lease on that building). Apart from a couple of outliers just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I’m only getting an 8% variance (about USD 0.23/gallon, versus your 25% and AUD 0.55/litre – is that right?).

    That said, Iwill admit that $0.10/gallon suboptimal average price is probably more likely than I thought, though with a less intense driving situation one would still be well under the $260/year “convenience premium.” Outside the US and other oil-subsidizing countries, the numbers clearly work out very differently.




  • People are weird about gasoline. They’ll drive around looking for the cheapest option, to save 2 cents/gallon. Even with a huge tank, that’s less than 50 cents of total savings.

    Bless 'em for keeping the price pressure on, but this is so very true. Once I ran a couple of mental hypotheticals, I stopped giving a shit, beyond avoiding places right by airports that jack it up a dollar or more (Las Vegas and especially Orlando, with lots of tourists in rentals, are the worst offenders I’ve seen).

    For a pretty extreme example consider, as you say, a large 25-gal tank, and filling up from dry twice a week, at an average of $0.10/gal non-optimal price: you pay an annual premium of $260 bucks not to drive yourself batty hunting for pennies, and burning at least a tiny bit more fuel to do it. Most people will pay far less. It’s just this weird thing that stuck in people’s brains long past the point where a cent increase was any significant percentage of the fuel purchase.












  • Yeah, there’s no two ways about it, book 1 is Royal Navy in Space, and the Peeps are almost a drop-in replacement for (little-r) republican France. We’re not dealing with hard sci-fi here, but I did think the infodump 2/3 through that described how it got to be “Royal” was less silly than I expected, if (again) a bit on the nose.

    I didn’t sense a ton of deep ideas forthcoming, but once I settled into letting the book be what it wanted to be, I enjoyed it well enough. Good airport/beach reading, and as I mentioned, you make Honor and the crew just a bit more compelling, and I think you’ve got a “brand” that could do really well in movies or TV. Master and Commander was a solid film that might have found a bigger audience if it were set on a star-cruiser.



  • It’s common, but it’s still not anywhere near the majority. The majority would be uncomfortable with religion being lumped in with the rest, and would be deeply uncomfortable with sports being there. The majority view is generally pretty chill, if (and it’s a big god-damned ‘if’) you toe the line on a few doctrinal issues and supply-side economics: get baptized in a protestant denomination, donate and/or go to church, don’t be queer, don’t be atheist, don’t be a single pregnant woman (and certainly don’t stop being one before the baby is born), be appropriately shamed of your vices, and understand that taxes prevent good Christians from having more to donate to charity. Check all the boxes, and you can go to college to get a business or even engineering degree and consume the milquetoast remnants of the monoculture. It’s more about conformity than religious ardor or theological purity.



  • I’m using Cricut Infusible Ink markers. They were pretty much made for this, using heat to dye polyester-based materials, like PBT. I just have a 5w diode laser, and I do it “low and slow,” 2% power and 45mm/minute. Black and blue still work best, but the red (pink) and green can be nice too.

    I have done two entire keyboards worth. The gray DSA i did in black are holding up great, but the legends went on wonky because I hadn’t refined my workflow. The next batch I did was on this same type of white XDA but while alignment was vastly improved, the ink didn’t go on as well. The only thing I did differently with these two was make sure to clean the caps with IPA first.