Creating a post in Discussion only requires “a few” points of karma; creating one in Main requires 20. I believe 20 is also required for creating a Meetup post; in most ways those appear to be treated as posts to Main (for example, up- and down-votes on them count for 10x the usual amount of poster karma).
Source: The LW FAQ, specifically http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Why_do_I_want_high_karma.3F
5+ years later, I’m curious: have you attempted this? If so, how did the attempt go? If not, is there a clear reason?
It’s probably a lot more effective to draw the water from ~10m down; the infrastructure costs are far lower, you’ll probably not need to insulate the water quite so much for coastal regions (to keep it from warming en route to the surface), you won’t need to pump so hard (you won’t have a vertical kilometer of buoyancy for your denser-than-shallower-water to fight).
For coastal regions, this might actually work, though those tend to be relatively moderate to start with (courtesy of the water). It would be a ton of infrastructure to get in installed in more than a small, clustered set of buildings / public property, though. For inland regions, you then need to pump cold (it’s not permitted to warm up much) corrosive (seawater is a pain) water over a long distance in a hot part of the world. Upon its arrival, you still need to get it into the heat exchangers that you have installed wherever financially practical. Then you have to get rid of the resulting slightly-warmer corrosive seawater.
Disclaimer: I don’t use iThings except occasionally for work, and those ones are always jailbroken. My knowledge of what Apple does and does not permit the nominal owners of their devices to do is limited.
You may be able to save a backup of your iPad’s current state to your computer, with the possibility of future restoration. This would back up both the apps and their data. You could then delete the apps (which deletes their data). If you wanted to play the apps again, you may be able to take a new backup and then restore the old one. Obvious downside here: if you ever do want to revert, you’ll have to (at least temporarily) do without the progress you made since the initial backup
Alternatively, delete only those games which sync their progress to an external service, after you perform the aforementioned synchronization. I don’t know which games those are, but they exist. Cross-platform ones, and those from major dev houses, are more likely to offer this feature.
… or you could jailbreak. There was a new one just released. You don’t have to do much with it except back up your own data, if you want. That’s one of the major reasons I rooted my phone.
Agreed. If you’re not willing to say “Nope, you crossed the line. See you next time, I’ll decide when that is, goodbye” (or similar) and leave (cut them off to whatever degree is needed to stop the harmful behavior), then you need to not give them an opportunity to start again. If you are willing to do so, though, or some other approach to ensuring your boundaries are respected, go ahead.
For the record, while I have a pretty good relationship with both my parents, I do not buy the line that a person always has an obligation to their parents. Sure, there usually is one, but your parent(s) put a finite amount of utility into your life, and negative utility is a thing. Parents trying to run the lives of their adult offspring drives me up a wall. Unless there’s something unusual about your capacity for self-reliance, at 25 you should not be living under anybody’s thumb to the degree described even without the negatives such as undesired/inappropriate criticism.
For what it’s worth, I see a surprisingly large number of (attractive and female) dancers on OKC. It seems like one of those things that, if you want to meet desirable women who are looking to meet men, is an obvious approach to take. Meet them at the dance studio, or at events with dancing, or online from a position where you can speak to their interest. Go on a date to a place that has dancing, or put on music and ask her to dance at home (there’s on OKC question about this; nearly all women—not just the ones who otherwise say they like dancing—indicate they’d respond favorably).
Massage is probably less directly useful for signaling attractiveness (although you could try; “I love giving massages” is probably generally a positive thing to say), but is certainly useful if you reach a point where it’s something you can offer your date… Anecdotally, my girlfriend and I give each other massages all the time, and it’s definitely one of the things we find attractive about each other. One of our most fun dates (after we’d been seeing each other a few months) was taking a massage class for couples.
TL;DR: Agreed on the “check the match questions, especially the ‘unacceptable’ ones” comment! The enemy rating can be a total lie.
Oh jeez, OKC match questions. I’m sometimes amazed that the site works as well as it does when the match questions (and their answers) are so terrible. Some very common problems I have with them:
1) Questions where the only possible answer is nuanced—“Would you date a person who ?” for some X that has a wide range of possible meanings—and the only possible answers are yes and no. No “maybe”, much less an “it depends”, never mind the chance to choose an answer specifying the thing it actually depends on. I just skip these, usually.
2) Questions/answers which presuppose an attitude on some subject. “If you discovered a first date was carrying condoms, would you tease them about it?” and all four possible answers indicate that this is a bad, or at best neutral, thing to do. My answer to this one is actually true—I probably wouldn’t say anything—but I’d approve and there’s no way (that is relevant to the algorithm; the “explain your answer” box is ignored for purposes of percentages) to indicate this approval.
3) Questions where, for example, there’s two acceptable answers, one unacceptable one, and one great one. Problem is, you can only specify that an answer is “acceptable” or not, and then rank how important it is that the other person’s answer is one of them. Do I mark all three that I’m OK with and say this is important, to strongly exclude the fourth, or rank it less important because two of them I’m not actually strongly in favor of are nonetheless acceptable? Or mark only the one great answer as acceptable, and then say it’s important because if you agree with me that’s great and should bump up our match percentages… or that it’s less important, because I’m excluding some options that would actually be OK?
4) Questions (or occasionally answers) where I want to give one answer based on what the question appears to be asking (if interpreted a little generously), but a more direct/literal interpretation requires a different (often opposite) answer. Do I accept the answer that I’d probably end up giving if I was asked this in person and gave the asker a chance to clarify, or do I actually answer the question as asked even though the way it’s asked is stupid and/or misleading? Am I actually being asked my view on the topic, or am I being asked whether it’s more important that a partner have good reading comprehension and basic decency/familiarity with well-known historical events and the ability to draw obvious parallels? Or maybe whether they answer things literally as asked, or are good at identifying the asker’s intent?
Not to derail this thread into a discussion of OKC’s amazingly-effective-despite-its-frequent-terribleness match question system, just pointing out that, despite my own suggestion of checking the enemy percentage, the enemy percentage can be a lot higher than is warranted. I have seen numerous cases where our answers were mutually unacceptable but, as explained in the “explain your answer” box, we actually have the same view on the topic. Sigh...
Sure, I can explain. Bear in mind that this is all based on my personal experiences (male, atheist, mid-to-late 20s, college degree, lives in Seattle, WA, only interested in dating women) and that although I have developed it over around four years I’m not claiming I’ve found the perfect strategy so far.
First of all, filter match ratios pretty hard. Anybody below a 90% is probably not worth checking unless they checked you first, below an 80% not even then. Above that it starts being more a matter of enemy ratio; above 10% is probably not worth it, above 15% quite unlikely. 95%+ match and 5%- enemy is always worth checking out.
Next, take a quick look for dealbreakers (you do have a list of dealbreakers, right? Not things like “overweight” unless you are super opposed to that, but things like being a smoker, or “I don’t really read stuff, lol”, or being significantly religious). Many people also list their dealbreakers; make sure you aren’t on them (sometimes it’s little stuff, like having a beard or being too short; seems silly but just move on and don’t waste the time). Distance or location is common one; not all 25 mile distances (or whatever threshold you set) are created equal. Relationship type (poly/open or monogamous) can often be a dealbreaker too.
OK, she’s a good match and there’s no dealbreakers. Take a look at her profile essays. There should be a few things that jump out at you; a show you both like, a book you want to read but haven’t yet, an interesting career path, a shared love of some sport or activity, etc. If you can’t find anything like that and want to dig deeper, you can check her photos for interesting scenes or captions—some people are just bad at writing profile essays, but reveal themselves to be interesting in other ways—but in general if you don’t have at least 3 things that really stand out as interesting it’s not worth the time.
Now you’ve got a good basis for a message, you just need the form of it. I tend to start with a simple “Hello” or “Hi there!”, or possibly something a little silly like “Greetings, fellow -lover!”. Don’t talk about yourself much, except to say things like “I just got back from , and it was awesome!” or “I see you’re also a fan of , have you read ?” Aim for 2-3 paragraphs; it’s totally fine to save some of your “hey, I like …” for a subsequent message and is probably a better idea than letting the first one go on too long.
A few DOs and DON’Ts: Don’t ask to meet right away, unless she expresses an interest in that herself. Save it for at least the second message, after she shows an interest in you. Do put your (first) name at the bottom; some women will be hesitant to share their name, but there’s nothing wrong with sharing yours. Don’t talk about tricky subjects in the first message (it’s cool to indicate a general alignment with their views—say, cheer for legalized gay marriage, or whatever—but don’t go into detail on your thoughts). Do comment on / ask about specific things from her profile and make it clear you actually read it. Don’t compliment her appearance (possibly unless you can pull it off suave as fuck); that’s better saved for an in-person date. Don’t include your phone number right away, again unless she has already indicated a preference for meeting up right away (most women will want to exchange at least a couple messages first).
You can “Like” the profile or not, as you wish; I don’t think it makes a huge difference either way if she doesn’t “Like” you first. If she does (or if you tag her and she tags you back) then that’s definitely a good sign, and you should put the effort into your message. Don’t make her wait too long!
If she writes back, the optimal response will depend a lot on what she says and this comment is already super-long so I won’t try to go into that. However, one thing I’ve found: do not keep the conversation going forever in messaging/email (though moving off the site messaging and switching to email after a round trip or two is reasonable and may feel a little more personal). If she hasn’t at least dropped a hint about meeting by her third message, suggest meeting in person, possibly over some food you both like or similar (keep it casual and low-key). If she doesn’t show signs of interest in the next reply, I usually don’t pursue it much more.
Interpreting the statement generously, ChristianKI probably meant “The raw gender ratio for the site as a whole doesn’t matter, only the success rate for people in your demographic (which is partially determined by the gender ratio in the relevant demographic but is not exclusively driven by it).”
For the record, a few ways that raw gender ratio may matter less than you think:
1) It doesn’t take orientation into consideration; that’s probably even (you “lose” the same percentage of women to lesbianism as you can “subtract” gay men), but then in theory the gender ratio should be balanced overall too.
2) It doesn’t take polyamory into consideration. The OP didn’t sound like he was looking for a poly relationship, but a lot of guys are fine with it and, in my experience, poly women tend to have a lot of partners (anecdotally, I know at least as many poly women as poly men, but that probably varies by demographic and may be incorrect more generally anyhow). In any case, poly allows one person to “count” as several for the purposes of such ratios.
3) It doesn’t take into consideration relative quality. The women the OP is interested in meeting are unlikely to be interested in all those barely-literate men who spam every person marked “female” on the site. They are only competition (demand) in the sense that they clog mailboxes and make it hard to punch a signal through all the noise. There doesn’t seem to be a significant corresponding category of women wasting mens’ time and mailbox capacity, so the ratio is way more even than the raw numbers suggest.
Anecdotally, my success in the dating world went up dramatically when I started using OKCupid; to put it simply, it got me past the “is she even interested in dating, much less dating me?” hangup that I tended to have, and led to a lower fear of rejection. Basically, I no longer worried about whether the attention was undesirable, something that I had a really hard time telling from in-person interaction back then (I’ve gotten better at it; this was years ago).
Also, while it’s certainly true that there are tons of guys on such sites and women tend to get a ton of attention (mostly undesirable, as in looking for dating but gets mostly messages along the lines of “your hot lets fuck”), it’s really not that hard to stand out from the herd. It might take a while to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but online dating is a much easier (in my experience) place to try things out (with regard to getting a date) than face-to-face. Also, online dating is a really good way for less-social types of people to meet other less-social types of people.
Now, with that said, even once you start getting first dates you should expect a lot of them to not go anywhere. That’s the way the world works. Learn from them, both what your partners didn’t like and what you didn’t like. Don’t assume it’s always something you can change about yourself except by refining what you look for in a partner. Again, this might take a while to find somebody who is into you, and you’re into them, and neither of you scares away or turns off the other… but it’ll happen, and being in a relationship is a huge emotional, self-esteem, and confidence boost… even if the relationship doesn’t last.
Edited the wiki entry for Seattle to include a reference to the “Rationality, AI through Zombies” reading/discussion group, which is starting up (again). Next meetup is here: http://lesswrong.com/meetups/1ey
That exposes the maximum surface area for combustion, I guess (the surface area actually increases as the propellant is burned, interestingly) so blowing the top would work, yeah.
Whoops, you’re right. I thought the gimbaling was just on the SSMEs (attached to the orbiter) but in retrospect it’s obvious that the SRBs had to have some control of their flight path. I’m now actually rather curious about the range safety stuff for the SRBs—one of the dangers of an SRB is that there’s basically no way to shut it down, and indeed they kept going for some time after Challenger blew up—but the gimbaling is indeed an obvious sign that I should have checked my memory/assumptions. Thanks.
Anecdotal, but I know of one case where the beggar got angry about being given food (I think it was something like a grocery store deli sandwich, still wrapped and unopened) and ranted at my friend about thinking they know better than the recipient about what they need and how the giver must not trust beggars with money and so on. It’s kind of funny in retrospect, but at the time it was disturbing and confrontational and (of course) extremely ungrateful, so there were definitely no warm fuzzies derived therefrom (more like a highly unpleasant fight-or-flight moment plus public embarrassment) and it really did feel like a waste of money. If your goal is warm fuzzies, or even just to convince yourself you’re doing some good, triggering an experience like that is utterly counterproductive. I can’t imagine it’s a common thing, but so far as I know, my friend has never again tried giving food directly (as opposed to donating to a food drive).
Best guess, it’s simply because Typical Mind is overwhelmingly more common (though this could be an example of TMF at work right here!). Humans are social animals, who value the agreement of others with their own views. It’s easy and comfortable to assume that other people will think similarly to you. There’s an even deeper level than that, though: you are the only person whose mind you are truly familiar with, and so there’s a huge availability bias in favor of your own thought processes on any subject. It requires more thought to consider what other people—either in particular, or generally—would think of a situation than it does to form your own thoughts; you do the latter automatically just be considering the situation at all. Many people will never put forth the extra effort without being prodded to do so.
Even those who claim to be their own special snowflake actually commonly do value commonality with other people. Hipsters (not saying you are one, it’s just a convenient category of identifiable people who, ironically, share a useful set of criteria) may proudly claim to think differently from the rest of society, but even then they are agreeing with each other about what to think differently about, and are frequently thinking different in the same way. If you drink PBR but claim to do so “ironically”, you’re a hipster; you belong to a society that may have some differences from the dominant one, but is internally relatively consistent. If you only drink micro-brewed craft beers of at least 7% ABV and made with organically-grown hops then you’re a couple different kinds of beer snob, but in a way that people can relate to; maybe they also prefer stronger beers, or stick to organic produce, or whatever, and they know other people who have those other preferences too so they can visualize you as the intersection of those groups, and you can be a member (a “special” member, but one nonetheless) of groups such as “craft beer snobs”. If you drink Bud Light and Coors Light but only when mixed with pear juice and Tabasco sauce, you’re actually a special snowflake… otherwise known as being just weird. People won’t really be able to relate to your tastes, and (except when trying to signal your different-ness) you probably won’t talk about your atypical taste when you’re at a bar and somebody strikes up a conversation.
I’ll admit I’ve had AMF moments myself, though. Topics I avoid talking about because I don’t expect anybody else to be interested, or situations where I think literally everybody must think some way except me because I don’t see any other counterexamples. It’s rare, though; at 28 I probably experience as much TMF in a week as I can recall AMF experiences in my life.
You’re also talking about fundamentally different kinds of rocket boosters. The Space Shuttle used solid fuel boosters, which are basically nothing except a tube packed full of energetically burning material, an igniter to light said material, and a nozzle for the generated gases to come out. They couldn’t throttle, couldn’t gimbal, couldn’t shut off or restart, didn’t use cryogenic fuel so didn’t need insulation, didn’t rely on pressurized fuel so they didn’t need turbopumps… In fact, as far as I know they basically didn’t have any moving parts at all!
You ever flown a model rocket, like an Estes? That little tube of solid grey gritty stuff that you use to launch the rocket is basically a miniature version of the solid fuel boosters on the Space Shuttle. The shuttle boosters were obviously bigger, and were a lot tougher (which made them unacceptably heavy for something like the Falcon 9′s first stage) so they could survive the water landing, but fundamentally they were basically just cylindrical metal tubes with a nozzle at the bottom.
Despite that, reconditioning them for re-use was still so expensive that it’s unclear if the cost was worth it. Now, of course, they cost a lot less to build than a Falcon 9 first stage, but every one of the Falcon 9 first stage’s nine Merlin 1D engines is many times as complicated as the entire solid booster used on the Space Shuttle. Even the first stage tank is much more complicated, since it needs to take cryogenic fuels and massive internal pressurization.
I think part of the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what parachuting into the ocean does to a rocket motor. The motors are the expensive part of the first stage; I don’t know exact numbers, but they are the complicated, intricate, extremely-high-precision parts that must be exactly right or everything goes boom. The tank, by comparison, is an aluminum can.
The last landing attempt failed because a rocket motor’s throttle valve had a bit more static friction than it should, and stuck open a moment too long. SpaceX’s third launch attempt—the last failed launch they’ve had, many years ago with the Falcon 1 - was because the motor didn’t shut off instantly before stage separation, like it should have. As far as I know, people still don’t know why Orbital ATK (FKA Orbital Science)’s last launch attempt failed, except that it was obviously an engine failure. We talk about rocket science, but honestly the theoretical aspects of rocketry aren’t that complicated. Rocket engineering, though, that’s a bloody nightmare. You get everything as close to perfect as you can, and sometimes it still fails catastrophically and blows away more value than most of the people reading this thread will earn in their lifetimes, leaving virtually nothing to tell the tale of what happened.
What does all that have to do with parachute recovery of booster stages? Well, once you’ve dunked those motors in saltwater, they’re a write-off. They can’t be trusted to ever again operate perfectly without fairly literally rebuilding them, which defeats most of the purpose of recovering the booster.
There’s nothing you could coat a rocket motor with that would both survive that motor operating and make it economical to re-use the motor after plunging into the ocean. The closest thing I can think of would be some kind of protective bubble that expands to protect the motors from the ocean once their job is done. It would need to be watertight, impact-resistant (the rocket still hits the water pretty hard, even with parachutes), able to deploy around the motors reliably, avoid causing a bending moment that collapses the tank (which has minimal pressure, because its fuel is depleted and any excess pressurizing agent you carry is wasted weight to orbit), and able to operate after being exposed to the environment in close proximity to a medium-lift rocket’s primary launch motors. Maybe it’s possible, but I can’t think of how to do reliably enough to be worth the added cost on launch.
That’s worth checking (both in terms of what Apple claims, and in terms of what any relevant legal precedents claim; a hardware warranty certainly shouldn’t be at risk from a software modification). On the other hand, it should be easy to “un-jailbreak” a device; just restore an un-jailbroken image onto it (for example, from a backup made before jailbreaking), and you can do so before sending the device in for warranty service. If the device is “bricked” to the point that you can’t restore it, then Apple probably can’t tell that it was jailbroken, either.