TauZero

Yes, the water perfectly removes everything and does not splash. I refused to believe it myself. TMI warning: for the first year in my disbelief I would test it personally, for science, by sticking a finger in for "first-hand" comparison. When using paper, no matter how much you wipe, afterwards, even if the finger looks clean, it still has a whiff of ass. Only a full shower after use would remove the whiff entirely. But after using the bidet, the finger looks clean and smells clean, so much so as if there isn't even a need to wash the finger afterwards (though of course I did anyway). In summary: paper = never fully clean, bidet = fully clean.

I think the difference in our bidet experiences is the water pressure. Mine is plugged directly into the water supply, and I have good water pressure, so the pressurized stream coming out is tight and powerful like a water pik. It took some getting used to. But it's easy now and it scours everything. I fear a gabo-style bidet that pours instead of powerwashes (or a spraybottle like the one linked in this thread) would not be as thorough and might indeed require a follow-up wipe. But mine doesn't.

You overlooked the hundred trillion dollar coin inside the [...].

No, money at rest does not create inflation. It is the consumption of goods and services through use of money that does. Trump could mint a one hundred trillion dollar coin and put it on display in the White House, and this would have no effect on prices, even though he is now richer than all Americans put together... as long as the coin stays on display. But the moment he tries to deposit the coin at a bank and start spending its value to pay for goods and services, all prices will skyrocket, because now there are more dollars competing to buy the same amount of food, the same number of houses, the same number of services, that existed/was being produced before, the same that you are trying to buy.

Remember those news articles last year how the wealthiest 10% of Americans drive 50% of consumer spending? That's how the rich influence prices. Not hoarding - consumption. The poorest 90% (those earning less than $250k/year, namely you) only have access to 50% of food and consumer goods and such. One person from top 10% consumes 9x more than one person from bottom 90%. If wealth inequality did not exist and the 10% consumed as much per person as the 90%, then you would literally be able to buy 1.8x as much stuff as you can now, with no other changes in productivity required.

You'd think so! right? But instead it is the idea of smearing shit on your ass with your fingers and a piece of paper that now sounds uncomfortable to me. This is the "completely changed your life" element of it. I've been using paper for decades no problem, but now I hate pooping outside of home because there is no bidet there. Beware!

Bidet - don't need any fancy standalone appliance, just a $50 nozzle that goes under the toilet seat and plugs into the water hose. Haven't paid a penny for toilet paper in 6 years.

The last guy on Putin's naughty list to fly into Moscow got an AA missile up the tail. Put me down for that.

Unpopular opinion: yes, you do. 2nd-hand markets contribute to the value of the original item even for things like clothing. When you buy a 2-year old car with intention to sell at 4 years, the price you are willing to pay includes the resale value you expect to get later. Which in turn influences the price of the new car that the original buyer is willing to pay. Another commenter mentioned cell phones having a chain of resales too.

But even for cheaper items that are donated instead of resold, the 2nd-hand use of the item has a non-zero effect on the original production and sale of it, because the act of donation itself is a notable event. You give away an item for free instead of throwing it in the trash because you think the item still has some value and you want someone else to enjoy that value. This works whether you give it directly for free to a person, or donate to a charity shop that then resells it. A charity donation is also recorded as tax-deductible.

The act of donation frees you from guilt/responsibility for throwing the item away without using up its full value. You are then free to buy more of the same item new. Faster than you would have otherwise, had the charity shop not existed. You also value it more, knowing that someone else can use it after you.

So here is a practical scenario for how this effect works. Imagine what would happen if instead of buying problematic child-labor fast fashion clothing from a 2nd-hand charity shop, you refuse! You keep wearing the clothing you have, or buy some non-problematic boring 2nd-hand clothing instead. And I do too. And every other charity store shopper stops buying them as well. Then the charity shop will refuse to take donations of those fast-fashion clothing, right? Just as they would refuse if you brought them a box of VHS tapes today. When the people would bring boxes of their mildly-used fast-fashion clothing for donation, they would be turned away - "nobody wants to buy those!"

Those people might not believe in their responsibility to eliminate child labor, but they still thought of themselves as good people, because they wanted to donate the remaining value for free, but now they can't. They have to either keep wearing those clothes themselves, or throw them in the trash without feeling good about it. They end up buying fast-fashion clothes less frequently, or buying other clothes instead. Either way, the value of new fast-fashion clothes goes down and less of them are produced, and fewer children are employed to make them. All because of 2nd-hand.

IMO, the only way to consume the remaining value of a 2nd-hand item without having an influence on its original production, is to literally pull it out of the trash. And you have to do it in a way that the original owner isn't aware of it. Because if they knew, they might feel good about it. Like a baker who makes extra bread knowing that most of it will be unsold and go in the trash at the end of the day, because they have seen people rummaging in the trash bin for food at night (not saying that's bad, just pointing out the chain of influence).

In practice, PGP signatures/keys usually work using the "trust on first use" model. The web-of-trust/physical verification of ID documents is a fun idea, but I've never met anyone who has used that method in the wild.

The difference between publishing hashes and signatures/keys vs. publishing hashes-only, is that you only need to trust the published keys the first time. They don't change from year to year. If one year someone hacks ubuntu.com and changes the image files and hashes AND uploads fake keys with signatures, you will notice that the signatures fail to match your saved keys and suspect something fishy.

This will not save you if this is your first time visiting ubuntu.com that happens to be the same day that it has been hacked, but it will protect everyone who has ever visited before and saved the keys. But if the releases were published with hashes-only, every year would be a new hash and a hack would easier slip through.

You can also try to verify the Ubuntu key out-of-band in places other than ubuntu.com, such as in blog posts, old forum/twitter/reddit posts, etc. In principle, hashes could be published on 3rd-party blog posts too, but again they change every year so not as interesting and you won't find them in as many random places as the pubkeys.

Last time I considered this it was $10M, though I might need to update it for inflation now.

That is irrelevant here though, because a robbery is considered a life-or-death situation in law not because of the monetary amount, but because of the everpresent threat of bodily harm. Whether explicit, with a pointed gun, or implicit. "Give me your money!" ... or else... is implied. If the criminal could reach into your pocket and take your money without use of force, without you even knowing, it would not be a robbery but a pickpocket larceny and precisely not covered by deadly force. But a criminal ordering you to give your money is a deadly situation, even if you only got $0.10 in your pocket.

You are implying we should value human life and just hand over the money, but that's not the issue here. There is no guarantee that you would not be harmed even if you cooperate. A fast food place in my city got robbed, the cashier handed over all the money but the robber got mad there was only $100 in the register, and shot dead the cashier and the customers. The criminal has already demonstrated reckless abandon by engaging you in a robbery, there is no longer any expectation (as would be with any normal stranger) that physical harm would not imminently follow. Next to a literal attempted murder, a robbery is the most dangerous confrontation you could ever find yourself in. I am glad that the law of my state treats it as serious as that.

If you are in a robbery and you are absolutely sure that no harm would come to you if only you cooperate, that is nice, and you can graciously demonstrate your value of human life by handing over your $100, or $12k, or $0.10 or whatever, but such security is not a privilege everyone shares.

physicists are quite confident only blackholes can Hawking radiate

Good to know! I was starting to get worried :D

you absolutely need a horizon to get radiation

Does the particle need to travel all the way from the horizon to reach you? How long does that take? The horizon still exists on the centrifuge, if only for a moment, shifting slightly from one instant to the next. In principle, at any moment you could detach from the centrifuge and fire 10g rocket thrusters in a straight line instead. In that first instant there is no way to tell the difference between the two.

I say this because in the linked paper, the "acceleration" experienced by the positrons was the bouncing off the atomic nuclei in the silicon crystal, which takes place over the space of a few angstroms, or at most within the 3.5mm size of the crystal, in the time given by the speed of 178GeV positrons (+Lorenz contraction). This instant was sufficient to claim Unruh effects were occurring.

Yes, you are right! A scam is not one of the specified crimes. As I understood it from the article, the phone call started out as a regular bondsman scam, but then escalated into threats of harm to the old guy and/or loved ones held in custody at the remote end (?), which elevates the severity, possibly up to a robbery-in-progress. The caller must have dropped the pretense at some point given that the old guy realized it was a scam yet still had the money ready to go in a package on the table. I'd have to read the actual court case to know what really happened, which is too much work, so I wrote my response under the assumption that the old guy was told a family member would be harmed unless he gave the money to an associate who was on the way.

In such a situation, it would be reasonable to initially detain the courier for investigation. If police officers were hiding in wait at the house, they would have done the same thing. It was unreasonable to continue to believe the courier was an associate once it was clear it was an uber driver following an app. So the old guy was guilty for detaining an innocent person without qualified immunity, and crazy for not listening to an explanation of what an uber driver is. Notwithstanding this, there seemingly were threats of physical harm through the phone, so if the old man did treat it as a robbery, and if the courier had been an associate, and the associate did get detained (by the old guy or by the police), and the associate did attempt to escape, there could be a situation where there was an imminent threat that the associate would return to join his accomplice on the phone and the two of them would inflict the promised harm upon the family member they were holding hostage. That would justify the use force up to possibly deadly force to stop the escape. It depends on what exactly was being said on the phone, though again we don't have the court transcript. Unlikely but possible.

Of course none of this happened, the courier was an innocent bystander, there was no hostage, and the old man was totally unjustified for opening fire under these circumstances. But that what the court trial is for. I do not dispute the outcome and I'm glad this person is now in prison. What I don't like is the headline saying a crazy guy shot a taxi driver over some missing change (that he himself misplaced). And then people argue that all self-defense is unjust because it lets crazy guys like this get away with murder. Which he did not get away with. And he was not crazy in the way the headline described it, but was in an intense situation which he might have been led to believe was life-or-death. And in the process he did violate self-defense rules in three specific ways. So we'd better learn the rules, and consider in advance our personal approach to the use of force, so we can act cool under pressure later. It could happen to you too.