he/him. LARPer, Nerd Organizer, Web Dev.
Mastodon admin, joeterranova@leftist.network
Not the CNBC guy but I’ve got Nihilist Stock Market advice🌻

  • 5 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Correct. Splitting hydrogen from water is quite energy intensive. Burning hydrogen into oxygen to make water releases energy, but not as much energy as it takes to split the hydrogen off in the first place. The reason to use hydrogen fuel cells is that the extra energy needed to generate the hydrogen is still far better than the carbon output and costly materials needed for making and charging a battery. Batteries need rare earth metals, and they lose their charging ability over time. Splitting water into hydrogen creates “potential energy” from the later creation of water again, making it a useful, clean way to store electricity.

    Same as the plans for using cranes stacking concrete bricks to store electricity. It takes more electric to stack them than is produced by unstacking them. But it’s a clean way to store potential energy, and far more efficient and sustainable than a battery.


  • Maybe instead of trying to train an AI powered car to deal with the insane chaos that is the road system, what if we designed something to remove that chaos? Maybe like a path that’s just for these self driving cars. There’s a network of paths to get you to your final destination.

    But if we did that, there’d still be our current problems of running out of fuel, or battery power. Which could be solved by electrifying those paths.

    But it’d be very difficult to have each of those individual cars switch between paths. Maybe it would be easier if instead of the cars switching paths, the people switched paths. Maybe we just make really long cars, and numerous people can get in them, and then switch cars as needed. People would need to know where to switch between these long cars. So we’d want to set schedules of when they’re running to where, and then have an app or something that just told you where to get on and off.

    And if they’re really long, maybe we could kickstart this before we have self-driving abilities anyway. We could just have one person in the front driving it.

    And maybe to reduce the need for rubber, instead of regular wheels on a road, they could just be metal wheels on metal tracks.

    Just throwing some ideas out there.


  • I miss the good times. I don’t miss the incredible jealousy, having to slowly shed all my female friends. I don’t miss arguments because some girl heart reacted my fb post. I don’t miss the gaslighting. I don’t miss just having to give her her way because she would never compromise, or see something from someone else’s perspective.

    I miss the year where I thought she was honest about being over her jealousy issues, when she wanted to be Poly. Where I could at least have healthy friendships again, while still being with her. Where I thought maybe I could fix things, turn our relationship around. But all of that was a mirage. She didn’t stop being jealous because she had changed. She stopped being jealous because she was done, and just leaving me slowly, and wanted to date another guy so she’d have another relationship to catch her when she left.




  • That was the entire point of mortgages. You’re paying interest, and could end up paying well over the original house value, but over a long enough time period, via inflation and property values increasing, you’re still making out ahead of renting. Depending on the mortgage interest rate, you could be better off not paying it off early.

    For example, I refinanced my house at 2.6%. Afterwards I started paying extra principal payments. My mother the accountant told me to stop. The interest rate is lower than inflation, I’m better off using the money for other things or putting it into higher yield savings accounts instead of paying it off earlier than schedule.





  • Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they’re “green texters” in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage’s connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is “Get your grandma an iPhone”. Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they’ll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.



  • Obama was a huge problem, but not because of being half black. Because he ran on a progressive platform, and then was decidedly Centrist once he actually got into office. The entire financial bailout could’ve gone way better, and moved the country in a far better direction, if he wasn’t busy placating his wall street friends. His drone program made every civilian in Afghanistan and Iraq despise us to the core, and made children afraid of the sky. He pushed through Obamacare/Affordable Care Act, which was the Republican plan, as a compromise. None of them voted for it anyway, he could’ve gotten through a much better plan instead. Hillary’s loss in 2016 was as much a denunciation of Obama’s centrism as it was about Hilary or right wing populism. And his interference in 2020 to get all the centrists to back Biden and shut down Bernie may have doomed us in 2024.



  • Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.

    Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.