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squidfood commented on ‘In London there is no space at all’: the rise of self-storage as rents soar   theguardian.com/uk-news/2... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
karaterobot · 3 years ago
They give examples of people needing space to make furniture, or fixing motorcycles in their storage units. Things which you can't feasibly pull off in a studio apartment. That makes sense, and I'm glad there is a solution for activities like that.

I think most people just use storage facilities to store junk they don't want to throw away, which is a different thing, and often unrelated to the size of your home.

Some people just expand to fill all available space. Most of my neighbors park their cars on the street, despite having two-car garages, and 2000 square foot houses. Their garages are full of boxes, to the point where you can see them leaning up against the frosted glass windows. My grandparents bought the house next door to the one they'd already filled with junk, and filled that one with junk too. I don't think it's necessarily the cost of rent or the size of apartments that proliferates self-storage facilities, I think acquiring junk and being afraid to get rid of it is a different (perhaps especially modern) problem that would exist regardless.

squidfood · 3 years ago
When we recently looked into self-storage to store our junk, the high prices per cubic foot (in a very HCOL area) made us recontextualize our junk in terms of how much rent each item was paying to live with us. Far more in rent over a few months then just buying a new one of whatever it was, when we needed it.

We got rid of a lot of junk.

squidfood commented on Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs   cbsnews.com/news/fishing-... · Posted by u/ijidak
kodah · 3 years ago
Apparently the definition of "sustainable" comes from the United Nations, not NOAA: https://ocean.si.edu/conservation/fishing/sustainable-fishin...

They also disagree with you that they've never been sustainably fished.

squidfood · 3 years ago
The problem is that "sustainable" is always based on past observations. There were 40+ years of observations for these crab and a stable fishery. But if the environment changes for the worse, the data-based definition of "sustainable" for a stock might not change fast enough to compensate.

So the "new sustainability" under climate change has to be much more precautionary than before, and yet not shut down on false signals. It's tricky science even when intentions are good.

squidfood commented on Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave   severe-weather.eu/global-... · Posted by u/goesup12
bob1029 · 5 years ago
I wish I knew more about meteorology. It must be incredible (and maybe a little harrowing) to be in that profession these days.

Does anyone have any idea how this heat wave will conclude? Does all that energy just fade out into a nice polite rainstorm, or should we expect something more dramatic to cap it off considering the unprecedented circumstances?

squidfood · 5 years ago
On the Pacific NW coast where this is happening, cool marine air will push in and eventually overwhelm the system holding in the heat. The change can be quite abrupt, as the two systems wrestle for dominance, I've felt it (in Seattle) is as a sudden breeze followed by what feels like turning the AC on - literally a 5-10deg temp drop in minutes and can drop 30deg in a couple hours. It doesn't generally end with full-on rain but with cool coastal clouds rolling in.
squidfood commented on Illegal number – Represents information which is illegal to possess   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ill... · Posted by u/belter
jasode · 5 years ago
>When is a file so large that it is no longer considered a number? If it is larger than 16 bytes?

It's not considered a "number" when society thinks of it in a higher conceptual abstraction than a number. It may sound like tautology and circular reasoning but that's basically it.

A 16-byte number is a range of 0 to 256^16. Can some value within that small range be illegal? Maybe if someone doxxed somebody with GPS coordinates of their house and embedded it in those 16 bytes, they might run in to trouble with the law. Examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=laws+illegal+doxxing

For larger examples... a 200k jpeg of a child in a porn scene is just a number less than 256^200000. A 2 gigabyte mp4 video file of a copyrighted Marvel Avengers movie is just a number less than 256^2000000000. Can those accused of a crime convince the following groups in society that those are just very large numbers in a mathematical sense:

- police arresting you

- jury convicting you

- judge sentencing you to prison

- employers rejecting your job application after you've served prison time

squidfood · 5 years ago
> It's not considered a "number" when society thinks of it in a higher conceptual abstraction than a number.

Which just shows that "number" itself is a conceptual abstraction, no higher or lower than the others.

squidfood commented on How to build a darkroom for £100 or less   35mmc.com/06/04/2020/dark... · Posted by u/lelf
piffey · 6 years ago
Darkroom printer here. This is one of my joys in life. Dumped all my digital cameras because printing my photographs gets me off the computer and the tangibility solidifies the work as important for me.

You can actually get away with printing without all of this equipment just to give it a try. I used to print 4x5 contact prints with nothing more than the light in the bathroom and a piece of photo paper.

To this day there remains nothing more magical to me then seeing the silver in the developer slowly produce an image on a page. Happy printing to anyone starting out.

Edit: Also of note that depending on your volume if you develop and print at home it can actually be cheaper than chasing the latest sensor every few years. I just barely crest what it would cost me with sensor upgrades to 2 bodies every few years this way because I am a pretty low volume shooter (2-300 rolls of HP5 a year).

squidfood · 6 years ago
It's been over 30 years since I spent much time in a darkroom but just starting to read that article and my smell-memory conjured up that very distinctive developer/darkroom chemical smell and all of the associated memories - for me too it was always evocative of magic.
squidfood commented on The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic   nytimes.com/2020/04/09/ma... · Posted by u/nkurz
yellowstuff · 6 years ago
Sadly, it's hard for me to imagine Weird Al will have much appeal to younger generations. If you've heard "Bad" 1000 times then his parody of it is hilarious, if you've heard "Bad" once on an oldies station maybe the parody still sounds goofy and funny, but you won't have the context to totally get the joke.
squidfood · 6 years ago
In the early 80s, I knew "Yoda" before I knew "Lola". Thanks to Disney's persistence, my kids now know and giggle at "Yoda" (picked up from the internet, not me) and only vaguely know that it came from some old song somewhere.
squidfood commented on Shutdown Will Be Worse for Economy Than First Thought, White House Says   npr.org/2019/01/16/685845... · Posted by u/craftyguy
nopriorarrests · 7 years ago
OK, I get that some projects will have to restart from scratch, but this is not like furloughed workers have "some real damage inflicted upon them".

It's just work, and their lives are more or less unaffected (with the exception of a single - so far - paycheck being delayed).

squidfood · 7 years ago
Our lab has been collecting an ecological time series every January for 35 years. Continuity is critical for monitoring change and the health of the population (under hunting, so there's an economic incentive). Now we have a permanent, unfillable gap. There are many such examples.
squidfood commented on Ask HN: Is There a Hacker News Equivalent for Politics?    · Posted by u/CM30
squidfood · 7 years ago
I've been a long-time member of a smallish but active forum (I won't post the address, maybe several hundred regulars). We've had very rational discussions and good exchanges of views between (U.S.) left and right in the 15 years I've participated.

However, since the presidential election, things have devolved into sheer anger. On the right, it's defending indefensible behavior (IMO, obviously). On the left, it's grasping more and more ridiculous legal theories and overreacting to trivial culture-war provocations. On both sides, the tit-for-tat has increased exponentially.

This forum has some very rational people who (outside of the politics threads) are very intelligent and sane on many subjects. The fact that this group can't manage it tells me that right now, I don't think anyone can.

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squidfood commented on Australian government proposes to limit cash payments for purchases to AUD$10K   theguardian.com/australia... · Posted by u/Mononokay
TomK32 · 8 years ago
How about publishing all government transactions, excluding salaries if we must.

If that works out well we can move on to publishing all transactions over a certain threshold (over a certain timeframe so you can't split the transactions). And publish all transactions that go to certain countries on black or grey lists.

Limiting cash transaction is a okay thing be there's much bigger fish to catch, if only politics meant it seriously.

squidfood · 8 years ago
U.S. government salaries are publicly available. Google and you can get a search tool and find the salary for any employee.

u/squidfood

KarmaCake day717October 27, 2011View Original