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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 30th, 2024

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  • I guess this question has to be looked at from multiple dimensions.

    From a purely economical and short-term perspective, maybe yes. Every human not contributing to society at an at least average level, is consuming ressources and driving up the costs. No matter if it’s due to illness, disability, depression, age, weakness, missing intelligence etc.

    From a social perspective, such a program quickly can turn into a nightmare: First of all, everyone would be under pressure. If you’re not a constant top performer, you’d feel like a burden on society. And the bar to be a top performer would constantly rise as more and more people on the ‘lower end’ decide to end their lives.

    Second, it’s impossible to quantify the value of a person holistically. People can provide no direct economic value and still be an important member of society. Like emotionally supporting others, being loved, providing jobs etc.

    Furthermore - in a society where at some point the ‘weak’ are expected to ‘voluntarily’ end their lives, people would be constantly scared. No one would be willing to take any risks because getting injured, getting a depression etc. would be like an implicit death penalty. This would again lead to devastating effects on economy.

    I personally think that everyone should be allowed to end their lives if they really deeply want it. But this should never be expected, actively promoted or pushed for. And I think it should involve at least a consultation with a medical professional to avoid hasty decisions due to a temporary crisis.





  • Hi, thanks for your answer.

    Are you aware of a study that systematically compared margarine and butter in that regard? I searched on Google Scholar but wasn’t able to find any trustworthy bigger / international papers. Some small scale ones looking only at a handful of products in Pakistan but nothing that feels really reliable.

    In Germany someone sent 19 popular margerine, butter and hybrid brands to a laboratory in 2015 to debunk the myth of trans fatty acids in margarine. Indeed, all plant-based products scored significantly better. Butter and ghee had 4 to 10 times higher amounts of trans fatty acids.

    The author of this study (if you want to call it a study) wanted to proof exactly that. Therefore, I personally would take its outcome only with a grain of salt. But as I didn’t find any more trustworthy sources, I’d be glad to see yours.









  • Always appreciate any work spent on any FOSS stuff out there but currently I’m a bit afraid that Gecko disappears into unimportance. So I’d prefer more contributions towards that one project rather than opening new ones.

    The issue with browser engines is that it always requires work from two directions. The browser engine must be optimized to render websites as good as possible. And websites must be optimized to be rendered by all the different browser engines.

    And (almost) no one is willing to do the latter for engines with a <1% market share. Already now, more and more commercial and non-commercial websites are only working properly with Chrome or its derivates.


  • If we say that the SSN database internally only stores numbers today, but could also store hexadecimal values without significant redesigns, I would assume that SSNs are stored as text already. So no matter if you put numbers, hex or text, 9 places will always use 9 bytes (assuming it’s ASCII only and doesn’t support UTF-8 etc.).

    Furthermore, the post implied that the current technical limit is 999,999,999. That very much sounds like a character data type to me. Otherwise, the limit is usually something like 2^x.

    If SSNs are stored as numbers today, then hex and text would lead to quite some change. If you go for a re-design, you can as well just increase the length of the field.





  • I like this definition the best. If someone is making a super complex sandwich with many ingredients and passion, then I’m fine to call that cooking. Same with a cold soup, a cous-cous salad or a fancy appetizer. Many dishes in top notch cuisine are served cold. In molecular kitchen, there’s even stuff served below freezing. Still all cooking to me.

    If someone just warms up a can of Ravioli, microwaves convinience food, etc. I’d consider that rather food prep. If using the microwave is just one step of multiple in a recipe, than that’s fine again.

    For me cooking requires a minimum level of effort rather than a minimum level of heat.