Days before the Queen of England died, the Roman Empire collapsed. Coincidence? (Literally no, but I sure could speculate).

My most frequent breakfasts are just coffee, or 2 eggs over medium, some kind of meat (spam, bacon, sausage, or steak in that order of prevalence), and some kind of bread (toast, English muffin, biscuit) with coffee. Those options account for perhaps 85% of my breakfasts.

Sometimes (1-3 times per month?) I have cereal and milk. Very rarely, I’ll have fruit and salami.

During the summer, I sometimes substitute iced tea for coffee. During winter, I sometimes have leftovers from dinner the night before. Any time of year, if there’s leftover pizza, I’ll have that for breakfast, cold, with salt and red pepper flakes added.

About twice a year I pull out my waffle maker, and make waffles on a weekend. Every time I tell myself I should do it more often, but every time it seems to sate my craving for ~6 months.

Owls don’t weigh 16 pounds (except for fat owls). 300 kilowatts is a rate of energy, not a total quantity of energy. 300 kilowatt hours (which is possibly what they meant?) Is only around 260,000 kilocalories (which is called “calories” on food labels because units of measure were made up by humans). According to an extremely naive google search, that would only take an owl 5 years to consume, rather than 10. If the original number were correct, that would mean this owl eats 8,000 calories per day. Which is not typical.

Onto the broader point, the efficiency of birds in flight is not as simple as this image suggests. There is no (useful) formula that takes the weight of a bird and the distance it will fly and tells you how many calories that takes. Birds can fly at different elevations, at different speeds. They can fly with or against the wind. They can change many things about how they fly to be more efficient or less efficient.

If you really want to know how many calories it takes for an owl to cross the ocean, first get the owl to the point of starvation, then bring it on a boat to the middle of the ocean. Feed it a fixed number of Tootsie pops, then sink the boat. With nowhere else to land, the owl will be forced to fly to shore. Based on how far the owl makes it, you can determine how far each tootsie pop allowed it to fly, and derive calories per mile from that.

They would hit the mountains at that height, and the FAA requires them to be up above airplane traffic anyways. After that, it gets crowded right above the launch pads, and sometimes there’s shooting stars and stuff, so some satellites are forced to go even higher.

I’ve been buying and ripping CDs since 2007. I average 8 per year, and it limits my music discovery speed a fair bit - but that’s OK.

When someone suggests a new song/band, I listen on YouTube/Vevo, and put up with the ad. It’s fine. It convinces me whether I want to buy their CD or not most of the time.

In order to meet a rising global demand for cheese, farmers must produce more cheese than they have in previous years. As a society, we have done fairly well at using the best/easiest land to raise cows on for raising cows. Additional cows to produce more milk require either working the same lands harder, which requires bringing in feed, water, and minerals, as well as increasing the risk of diseases, and thereby increases the price of the milk for making cheese, or else raising cows on new, typically less favorable lands.

Some industries can offset this rising cost with improvements to technology, or finding areas of the world with lower labor costs, and some governments support agriculture through tax policy, or subsidies to help keep prices low. From 1949 until 2014, the US government ran a program to buy cheese when the price fell too low, and sell cheese when the price ran too high, in an effort to stabilize prices.

I got 17/28… I do not use javascript. This is not the first time I have taken this quiz (but it has been a while).

It’s a cycle I can describe, but cannot understand. A business has some minor decline in sales, or profits, or whatever. Private equity firms convince one group of people this is the biggest disaster, and the company is ruined forever, hardly worth anything. Simultaneously, they convince a second group of people that the company has a strong business model, and will recover soon.

The second group lends the company a ton of money to buy itself from the first group of people, for the private equity firm. Now, the private equity firm tries to make a temporary spike in value, pay themselves large dividends, and sell the (now actually, fundamentally broken) company for as much as they can.

The original shareholders lose. The employees of the business lose. The banks (or their insurance company) lose. Private equity wins.

My lack of understanding is, if I were a bank, I would spot this scam either the first, or second time it happens. Next time Mitt Romney came to ask me for ten billion dollars, I would tell him to pound sand. How has it taken actual professional bankers hundreds of times to (still not) see the cycle?

Likewise, the insurance companies backing some of these loans must know they’ve lost billions on this. Why haven’t they done anything?

Out of luck, and no refunds. Sorry, it’s just policy.

“AAA” gaming began as a reference to the “AAA” creditworthiness rating, meaning (essentially) “certain to repay the loan” // “certain to earn more than the development costs” (contrarespectively). AAA gaming has always been about the safe bet, the easy money, and the tailored to mass market design.

High budget games can only have so much ROI, so there’s kind of implicitly a limit on how much risk is tolerable for investors/publishers. Meanwhile, a game that costs a few million (or even less) could be the next big success, and rake in a massive sum - enough to justify its own budget in addition to many failed attempts to craft a star.

Even more risky is indie gaming, where the cost of development is provided by crazy people that want to produce “fun”, and gain money as some kind of (important) side effect. That’s where you get the wild “no one (in the know) would expect this to work” ideas, and most of them do fail, just as expected. The ones that are good enough to make it are by nature surprisingly good - indeed, this surprise is why publishers won’t go after the same concept under most conditions.

Healthcare costs grow rapidly as you age, and have been outpacing inflation in the US. If your remaining money is only keeping up with inflation over time, you are very likely to fall behind later in life, when job opportunities are more scarce, and less lucrative.

If you can make changes to live more frugally now, and work a year or two more while your money is growing in the background, you will be much better off long term.

I have numerous family members that have lived a long time, and eventually faced severe health issues, so I expect that in my future. I will work until my retirement savings are more than I need for my current lifestyle, and then cut back on certain things to do my best to prepare for that eventuality.

Do they get all my usernames, or just the one on Lemmy?

On the upside, I think this username wouldn’t be hard to spell out for people. There’s no downside, mine is a perfect username.

Are you perhaps thinking of someone else? As far as I’m aware, Schrödinger is only well known for work in particle physics, quantum mechanics, and related physics fields.

A 1.5" long number 8 wood screw has slightly more than half the holding strength when it is driven by a hammer into 2 3/4" pine boards, relative to the traditional rotating the workpiece approach, but takes only about 1% of the time to install. You can very easily add a second screw to achieve the desired strength, while often gaining resistance to torque in the workpiece.

Meanwhile, 3D printed screws usually break when struck with a hammer, so they’re no good for this approach.

A keep

I suspect it started with self censorship (“as f”) rather than abbreviation.

I flew to an industry event on a Southwest flight full of many people roughly my age, who worked my job, or related jobs. Deplaning was extremely fast once the door opened.

Maybe part of that is everyone being able bodied, and traveling without children, but I also didn’t see anyone that waited to get their items in order until the last minute, anyone that had to travel towards the back of the plane to get their carry on, or anyone who halfway entered the aisle, blocking it just enough that people couldn’t move past - which are all things I have seen on most other flights I’ve taken.

That’s Anthony Daniels, playing the role of the god of the Ewoks.

I was going to take it in a 1987 Toyota Camry, manual transmission, but the clutch burned up (not my fault… Maybe), and my parents didn’t want to get it fixed. I took the test in the driving school’s only manual transmission car, which was… A gray sedan, with a second brake pedal for the passenger.

Which mass transit vehicle did you pass your test in? How did parallel parking go?