The oil that you mix with gasoline for two-cycle engines like chainsaws usually has a fuel stabilizer added to it. I've had gasoline lawnmowers where the gas goes bad and gums up the carburetor in less than a year. I usually try to add stabilizer to my cans of gas for lawnmowers, and I also use higher octane gas, which also makes it last longer. (And the higher octane runs slightly cooler, so the engine lasts longer. At least in theory.)

I think there's also a survivorship bias here. Someone who makes it through adversity will generally be stronger for it, but it's easy to forget about all the people who faced adversity and didn't come out on the upside. See, for example, the perennial problems of drunkenness, addiction, etc. - often (though not always) among those trying to escape adversity or difficulties of some kind.

Most people who are applying for jobs at NVIDIA probably grew stronger because of any adversity they faced, rather than burning out.

My house had a 30-40 year old Maytag washer and dryer in it when I bought it a few years ago. I replaced a valve on the washer, and a belt in the dryer, and both are still working great. And they get heavy use - me, wife, bunch of kids.

They're probably quite inefficient, but we don't care about fancy cycles or anything like that. The washer is done a cycle in only 30 minutes, and the dryer is done in 60 minutes. Very predictable, so I don't need a notification to remind me when they're done. I don't plan to replace them unless/until I have to...

That's pretty cool. At >$2 each, they aren't practical to put on individual items though. Definitely practical for pallets, maybe even crates or boxes depending on the cost of what's inside.

Good point. Sulla definitely seized power.

I had Cincinnatus in mind, who was more similar to Washington.

I'm not familiar with Juan Carlos 1, but I think it might be a bit of a stretch to say that either Washington or the Roman rulers seized power. They reluctantly accepted power, rather than explicitly seeking it. (At least, that's true if we take the historical accounts at face value - which I'm inclined to do since they actually relinquished power eventually.)

Thanks for sharing! I love that test kit.

Interestingly enough, the legislature of colonial Virginia tried to restrict the slave trade (and slavery itself, to some extent) in the mid-1700s, but the English king overruled any such laws. Virginia's leadership had obviously changed quite a bit by the next century, sadly.

Regardless, it's a disservice to many of the early leaders of the US (before and after independence from England) to paint them all with the same brush. They were living in a very different culture, and even the mere idea that all men were created equal was a bit of a radical idea at the time. We should readily acknowledge their shortcomings, but also recognize their accomplishments. And we should have some humility, since we have our own failings in our age, and we don't know how future generations will judge us.

And, like you said, using their statements isn't a good argument. But we can still learn a lot from their examples - both good and bad.

Gotcha - mandatory ballot submission vs mandatory casting a vote in every race makes more sense to me.

I definitely did not mean that I wanted any legal restrictions on informed voters, just that in the abstract, for a democracy to work, the voters need to know what they are voting for and against. On the other hand, if we end up being governed by the Pants Party, then we probably deserve it. ;-)

I like the idea of everyone voting, but that runs up against the practical reality that people who don't care would be voting randomly. We could mandate voting, but we can't effectively mandate informed voting. We already suffer from many (most?) people voting against the terrible other party and not really voting for anything in particular. All the natural inclinations of media (both conventional and social) to stoke partisan tensions doesn't help. But that is probably really getting off topic...

The biggest theoretical issue is that anyone, once registered, never has to show ID again - and that can be decades later.

I don't know anything about proof of any actual voter fraud, but consider the following:

Back when all the allegations of fraud were circulating after the 2020 election, I started to investigate some specific allegations related to Pennsylvania. Turns out anyone can buy the PA voter database for about $20. So I bought it and explored a bit. Tons of information - names, addresses, date last voted, etc.

It would be trivial to generate lists of names and information for inactive voters (dead, moved, no longer motivated, whatever). Then you could fairly easily impersonate those people.

Now - I'm not concerned about that happening on too massive a scale, as it would still require large numbers of people to actually do the impersonating (barring any malevolent actions of local poll workers, but that would be limited to a locality anyway).

Turned out the allegations I was investigating were mostly nonsense. At least, they were nonsense enough that I never bothered thoroughly finishing my investigation.

Not quite a dupe - the last story was only about Dutch athletes being warned.

Glad to see someone mentioned this line of thinking.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible events, but the (all-too-literal) Rape of Nanjing was at least comparable, and arguably worse. And that doesn't include all the other horrors of the war.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't condemn that particular use of nuclear weapons, but we should at least be very slow to do so, given that the choice at the time was between terrible alternatives: a trolley problem on an enormous scale, with enormous uncertainty of how many people were on each track.

Since you seem to have a beef with my comments, I'd suggest you read the whole thing. My main point was more or less the same as one you've been making - that just looking at some foods is a bad comparison, and you need to look at the relative emissions of a nutritious vegan diet versus a nutritious omnivore's diet.

Now go eat a steak or something - that'll be much better beef than you'll get from my comments. ;-)

Thinking a little more, I guess I probably perceive meat as being more calorically dense when really meat is just more dense.