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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • 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.






  • Headline is probably not wrong, but it’s definitely overdramatic compared to the actual story. Everything awful MS is actually doing is there barely a millimeter under the surface, but the story is more directly about how they’re jerking AMD and Intel around.

    Still, it’s an impressively clear showcase of how much power Microsoft really has. It’s taken two companies that usually have their product cycles planned years in advance and kicked them into panic mode. Hopefully we don’t see a repeat once Microsoft finds it fit to bring Copilot+ to desktops.


  • Americans absolutely have to own it, and many of us try to. America has consistently made awful decisions regarding race.

    The point is more that white Europeans are not special, and much of the perceived enlightenment from Europe is either top-down messaging from socially unassailable elites, or from societies that are homogenous enough that the economically insecure don’t (yet) blame their struggles on the tiny number of visible minorities in their community.

    Americans who “whatabout” any criticism from an imperfect messenger are probably not acting in good faith, but the inverse is worth considering as well.




  • 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.






  • Prime Minister Narendra Modi has questioned his biological origins, asserting that he is “convinced” of being a godsend, introducing the idea of “immaculate conception” in the electoral arena as voting enters the final phases.

    “Pehle jab tak maa zinda thi mujhe lagta tha shayad mujhe biologically janm diya gaya hai. Maa ke jaane ke baad, een saare anubhavon ko mai jod kar dekhta hoon toh mai convince ho chukka hoon ki parmatma ne mujhe bheja hai (Till my mother was alive, I had the impression that perhaps my birth was a biological one. After her demise when I view after assimilating all the experiences, I am convinced that God has sent me),” Modi is heard saying in an interview to News 18 last week.

    I’m not a Hindi speaker or familiar with if/when Modi likes to dabble in metaphor, but this seems straight up delusional and cult-like. The opposition certainly seems to think it was worth mentioning.