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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I’m not sure. That’s why I asked. I wasn’t sure what you had in mind with the “most of the Internet” phrasing.

    Going back to basics, “The Internet” is just a big network connecting lots of small networks. So “most” would be counting physical machines connected (or logical hosts? Does a single physical machine running 32 VMs count as 1 or 32? Oops, we’ve muddied the waters already!).

    But…bandwidth matters, too. The point of the Internet is the communication between systems, no? Video compression has come a long way, but it still uses a ton of data. At the same time…watching a movie on Netflix is still doing just one thing.

    Opposite side of that coin is traffic. If you’re looking at this from the standpoint of running a website, you’ll be concerned with how many requests are coming in. Lots of sites used to get ‘slashdotted’ when an article mentioned them and suddenly they got 100x the requests they could handle. Or email…one email doesn’t take much, but billions of them get sent every day.

    Or maybe something else?






  • Oh, I’m nowhere near average in this respect. Believe me, I know I’m tremendously privileged to have the level of stability that I do.

    The point I was trying to make is, even with the relative stability I do have, I’ll still lose my house if I lose my job and can’t find another one quickly enough.







  • Does it matter if you have more than the average person* if your house is effectively over quicksand?

    Most Americans have more than the average person planetwide, but we’re one job loss away from being homeless. There’s no real stability in the job world, so our lives are mostly relying on luck**.

    I’m paranoid about this type of thing, so I:

    • Live in a cheap house - purchase price about 60% of what the bank would have approved.
    • Drive an old car. I bought it in 2012 with a low-interest loan. No car payment since 2017.
    • Save aggressively. Max retirement accounts and keep up a healthy emergency cushion.

    *I’m taking “average person” here to mean “has more wealth than 50% of people on Earth” (wow, such a high bar!)

    **Not entirely luck, but I’ve read too many “lost my job in tech to layoffs in 2023/2024 and am now homeless” accounts to believe in any guarantees in the American economy.







  • I don’t agree. It’s easy to backseat drive the chariot now, but at the time? A mile as one thousand paces? That seems sensible when you’re measuring distance for men marching and horses or oxen pulling wagons. I can’t really speak to their monetary system, I’d have to read up on it more. And for numbers, well, you can hardly fault them for not using something that didn’t exist yet.

    For units in general, though, there are definite benefits to a base 12 system over base 10: You can easily deal with halves, thirds, and quarters without introducing decimals.

    Oh, and I did chuckle a bit at your Lego remark. I’m glad you phrased it that way :D


  • Sorry, what do the ancient Romans have to do with it?

    And, ok, so we’d be talking numbers in the 5-10 oz/mi range. Why is that better?

    Status quo: “How far can I go with a unit of fuel?”

    Flipping it: “How much fuel does it take to go 1 unit of distance”

    It just seems arbitrary to me. What am I missing that makes the status quo backwards?

    Edit: I’m leaving this up, but nevermind – after posting this reply, I read your replies to others in the thread. I think I see. Linear units vs. “confusion units” (lol, cute term!).