trailee

joined 1 year ago
[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I’ve noticed that anecdotally as well. There are a lot of good points already listed in other comments, and I have a couple merely additive points.

On an individual passenger basis, direct flying has always been operationally cheaper if both options exist, because it’s a more efficient use of resources. In practice, financial efficiency also requires keeping all flights as full as possible, so it was maybe helpful for an airline to incentive a customer to keep hub flights full by pricing connections lower than a direct. The direct flight is arguably more valuable to a customer because it’s a better experience, so it can cost more. All three flights are going to fly anyway, so making the sale is most important to the airline.

But equally or more important, the overall volume of air travel passengers has grown enormously over the past several decades. I’d bet that many direct routes didn’t used to have enough pairwise volume to run a regularly full profitable flight, let alone multiple competing direct options. Now I expect a ton more pairs of cities to make economic sense.

Looking at it another way, that increased travel volume over decades also came with larger airports to support more total trips, and each of those new flights need to go somewhere. Airlines can add more options throughout the day to cities already served, and they can add new cities. They naturally choose both, therefore more direct routes are created. As more direct routes have supporting volume, the inefficiencies of the hub and spoke model dominate the bottom line.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The billionaires are this much in charge, and I fear for the political future of the US. They will never give back willingly either the control or the climate data. The US rich have reached an inflection point in escaping their increasingly flimsy pen, helped greatly by the Russians in a surprise twist Pandora’s box delayed ending to the Cold War, smoldering for years like a peat bog fire. European power will collapse following AMOC collapse. Russia and China win every step of the way. Too much of the US populace is under the spell of an old, unhealthy mad man. Some billionaires will attempt to choose his replacement, more corruptly than the last time.

Climate change is WWIII.

Use Signal.

Support free and open source software.

I’m sorry, -An American.

Happy 4th of July. There will be fireworks tonight.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The agency said its actions were warranted because the employees had signed the letter using their official titles and because the letter had denigrated the agency’s leadership. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” the E.P.A. press secretary, Brigit Hirsch, wrote in an email.

What an unpleasant snowflake!

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago

Very interesting paper, and grade A irony to begin the title with “delving” while finding that “delve” is one of the top excess words/markers of LLM writing.

Moreover, the authors highlight a few excerpts that “illustrate the LLM-style flowery language” including

By meticulously delving into the intricate web connecting […] and […], this comprehensive chapter takes a deep dive into their involvement as significant risk factors for […].

…and then they clearly intentionally conclude the discussion section thus

We hope that future work will meticulously delve into tracking LLM usage more accurately and assess which policy changes are crucial to tackle the intricate challenges posed by the rise of LLMs in scientific publishing.

Great work.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Hard to tell from the video, but it doesn’t seem likely that the trucker is at fault here. The work crew seems to be trying to cheat and avoid lane closures, but they’re operating the bucket too low for that. There’s probably a middle manager somewhere who decided that lane closures were too expensive and unnecessary, standard procedure be damned. People forget safety rules are written in blood.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

Gable-mounted still incurs direct vibration into the structure. I have a QuietCool whole house fan that is suspended in midair from the gables, to reduce that vibration and noise, while being ducted from a framed opening in the hallway ceiling.

Whole house fans are pretty great during the right season, but you need to be aware of the humidity level outside or you can make things worse even if seems cooler at the moment. I also have central AC that gets run either when it’s too humid or too hot at night. But overall I’m very happy with the whole house fan and only having moderate insulation - the house resists heat incursion during the day and then we can quickly cool things down in the evening without using too much electricity.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 weeks ago

Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

You must be one of those weirdos on Lemmy. Nobody has even heard of that place! /s

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Signal provides all the privacy I need, and it’s nowhere near as skeezy as most of the alternatives mentioned in the comments here. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, but if OP would like to detail their objections to it, I’d be happy to hear them.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)
[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago

Almost everything in that list of new features sounds negative to me. A few are neutral, and one might be positive depending on how it’s implemented (having the phone monitor a phone call while sitting on hold). Pretty disappointing, Tim Apple.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 month ago

It might! But the article I linked also suggests it might destroy ozone and have a net warming effect. We just don’t know. The upper atmosphere has never before had this level of direct pollution injection.

 

This is the swivel mechanism for the high pressure air at the center of my Campbell Hausfeld automatic retracting air hose reel. That hose is crimped directly on the swivel mechanism instead of adding negligible cost with a threaded fitting.

The upshot is that the hose is not replaceable by itself if damaged. And of course parts are not readily available. Throw out the whole thing instead and buy something new. Assholes.

 

Incogni has great advertising claims, but it feels pretty expensive as an ongoing subscription. Have you used it or do you currently use it? Please tell me about it.

 

The link is to a year-old article that helped me decide not to pay Alaska Airlines’ voluntary SAF carbon mitigation fees. I’m still not certain about the right choice, and would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

The big picture includes acknowledgement that there’s no such thing as ethical consumption within capitalism, so in some ways this choice is entirely irrelevant. Also that flying is by far the most polluting form of transportation per passenger mile so we should each minimize doing it. Finally that flying has the most challenging logistics of shifting energy sources, fundamentally because batteries are heavy.

Alaska offers me a choice during the checkout procedure to contribute to SAF accounting for between 5% and 20% of the fuel that my flight will use, but it has nothing to do with the fuel actually consumed by my flight. They are already buying some amount of SAF and using it in their SFO hub only, so the program is hand waving about the fungibility of fuel consumption. Really they’re just offering me the opportunity to donate money towards their SAF usage, indirectly supporting the growth of the SAF industry.

It seems to me that the whole SAF industry is currently greenwashing bullshit, piggybacking on the big lie from the past few decades that adding ethanol to automotive gasoline is “sustainable” in some meaningful way. But that ignores the water usage depleting aquifers at an accelerating rate, necessary fertilizer use and soil depletion, using food-producing acreage for fuel instead, energy usage in planting/harvesting/refining/distilling, and so on.

Please validate my choice not to donate to the current state of SAF, or provide links to interesting reading that supports your claim otherwise.

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