Perhaps the only way to get rid of them for sure is to require a CAPTCHA before all posts. That has its own issues though.
Perhaps the only way to get rid of them for sure is to require a CAPTCHA before all posts. That has its own issues though.
“Carbrain” refers to a person who believes that driving and personal transportation as synonymous and thinks accordingly when deciding to support or oppose transportation infrastructure and urban planning projects.
Other people have described the health effects, so I’ll describe the chemistry. Fats are made of long chains of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms attached to a “head”, which is made of other elements or structures. Carbon atoms normally can make a total of 4 bonds. Hydrogen atoms can make 1 bond.
Carbon being able to make 4 bonds means that in the chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms in fat molecules, each carbon atom makes a bond with the carbon atom before it in the chain, a bond with the carbon atom after it in the chain, and then bonds with two hydrogen atoms separately off to the side. This makes a total of 4 bonds. If all of the carbon atoms in the chain are like this, that’s “saturated fat”, because the chain of carbon is completely “saturated” with hydrogen atoms.
(Hydrogen atoms are white, carbon atoms are black, oxygen atoms are red)
Saturated fats have the often desirable property of being able to be tightly packed together, and thus are typically solid at room temperature. Butterfat is mostly saturated fat.
However, carbon atoms can also make a double bond with other carbon atoms. If a particular carbon atom in the chain makes a double bond with the carbon atom before it, it could cause a bend in the chain of carbon atoms. In that case, it also means that those particular carbon atoms in the chain that have formed a double bond with each other only have 1 available bond left (after also forming a separate single bond with the carbon atom before or after it), so it can only bond with one hydrogen atom. These are, therefore, called “unsaturated fats”, and because they don’t pack together easily, they are typically liquid at room temperature.
If there is a single double bond in the chain, it’s a monounsaturated fat.
If there are two or more double bonds, it’s a polyunsaturated fat.
Notice how the hydrogen atoms connected to the double-bonded carbon atoms in unsaturated fats can be connected to either the same side or the opposite sides of the two hydrogen atoms. If they’re on the same side, they are called cis-unsaturated fats. If they’re on opposite sides, they are trans-unsaturated fats, or trans fats in short.
This is oleic acid, a cis monounsaturated fat commonly found in many vegetable oils:
While this is vaccenic acid, a trans-monounsaturated fat. It is found naturally in butter and human milk and is not particularly bad for you:
Note that this is NOT the same picture as the one I showed for saturated fat. The 7th and 8th carbon atoms from the left are double-bonded and, therefore, are each missing a hydrogen atom. The one remaining hydrogen atom on each is bonded on opposite sides.
Note that trans-unsaturated fats are also pretty straight. This means that they can also pack together with saturated fats to make a solid product at room temperature.
“Hydrogenation” is the process of adding hydrogen to unsaturated fats to saturate them. This means that liquid oil can be processed into a solid product. That’s how margarine and shortening are made. In previous years, partially hydrogenated oils that weren’t fully hydrogenated could leave substantial quantities of trans-unsaturated fats left in the product, but after health concerns, many countries’ food safety authorities banned these artificial trans fats. Fully hydrogenated fats consist of only saturated fats since they have been “fully” hydrogenated, and that is what food manufacturers have been doing instead.
The point seems kinda moot outside of cities.
Are you expecting a bus stop outside every farmhouse? Who’s going to ride it, cows?
Or in a small town where everything is reachable on foot within fifteen minutes anyway and the road has like 2 cars per minute? Regional bus service that takes you to nearby towns that comes a few times a day is probably as good as it gets.
I don’t know what it’s like in other places but I tend to find that in cities with an actual dedicated serious transportation agency, busses run every hour at minimum. Even regional busses in the small city where I attended university ran 6-8 times a day per line for three very similar routes. Local busses ran every 20-40 minutes depending on time of day. That’s shocking good for a city of 50,000 in America.
A 2025 Toyota Camry is 4.84 m in length. A typical US school bus is 10.5 m in length. The school bus is 2.18 times as long as the car.
You don’t need to convince anyone. People will convince themselves if they are given the appropriate environment. This is about convincing them to support the construction of that environment.
Think about New York. It’s subject to the same cultural influences as the rest of the US but public transportation use remains high because the infrastructure is good and competitive with driving.
Opposition to the zipper merge might be a regional thing. Where I’m from, people can zipper merge just fine, especially after the state transportation agency put up a bunch of billboards telling people to do it.
The solution to that is to… not tell them that you want to take their car away. Because if you are a rational urbanist, you don’t.
Also, if the car park is smaller due to fewer people driving, it means it will be easier to remember where you parked your car, and you won’t have to walk as far to the destination. It also means you can fit more stuff in the same space, so you won’t have to drive as far to get to the places you want to go, saving you time and fuel!
These arguments are won and lost on the phrasing.
Most people I have found care relatively little about the topic. They drive and think in terms of driving only because that is the context they have been exposed to their entire lives, and there’s not really their fault.
If someone really is that deep into the rabbit hole then nothing you say will change their mind, so don’t waste your time.
The exact data is Figure 1, chart A. It seems the mean is around 4,000-5,000 μg/g, which is indeed 0.4-0.5%
I really had to run a fact check on this but it really does seem to be true.
Brains are 0.5% plastic by weight and with an average human brain mass of 1.3 kg, that means humans, on average, have 6.5 g of plastic in their brain
Password is necessary for two-factor authentication. The factors of authentication are something you know (like a password), something you have (like a cell phone), and something you are (like a biometric).
An example of three-factor authentication would be this—imagine a spy going into a secret bunker. They need to scan their iris, insert a key card, and then enter a passcode before the door opens. This has all three factors of authentication; the passcode is something they know, the key card is something they have, the iris scan is something they are.
If it just sends a code to your phone, that’s one-factor authentication (something you have). Anyone with your phone can get into your account. Unless, of course, your phone hides its notifications and you have a screen lock. Then that’s actually two-factor authentication because you also need to know the phone PIN or have the biometric.
If it just asks for a password, that’s one-factor authentication (something you know).
If it asks for your password and then sends a code to your phone, which you need a fingerprint or face scan to unlock, you have achieved three-factor authentication.
Edit: Interesting tidbit—in the USA, you can rent a mailbox at the post office to receive mail when you don’t want to give out your real address. Useful for privacy reasons. I’m sure they have similar things in other countries. These mailboxes come with a key. This is actually two-factor authentication, because the keys usually don’t have the mailbox number written on them! So you have to have the key and also have to know which mailbox among the hundreds at the post office it opens.
TOTP is standardised by RFC 6238 so all TOTP clients must comply with the standard and therefore work equally well. Pick the one whose UI you like the most and is otherwise good enough for your use case and personal preferences. It’s similar to arguments over CPU thermal paste—its presence or absence makes a much larger difference than the method of application.
You do, however, want to pick something that is free and open-source and also popular. Google Authenticator (closed source) definitely is a functional TOTP client but you have to trust that the Google engineers have done a good job building a secure app. Since it’s Google, they probably have, but a principle in security is that you should not have to trust more people than absolutely necessary.
Yes, but this is like replacing the front door of your house with a bank vault door. Yes, it’s more secure, but there is a point of “reasonably secure enough” for most people and at some point, you are just inconveniencing yourself for no tangible gain.
It’s not a hard concept. In almost every well-designed security system, the weakest links are invariably the humans
The passwords are stored locally. You can test this yourself by turning off your WiFi or disconnecting your Ethernet cable and then going to about:logins. All the passwords will still be there.
It is a vulnerability, but exploiting that vulnerability is not generally considered by security experts to be “hacking” in the usual meaning of that term in academic settings. Using an open or exposed API, even one with a sign that says “don’t abuse me”, is generally not considered hacking.
I love the Internet Archive but they are pretty clearly legally in the wrong here.
Not morally, mind. I support open access to knowledge. But they very clearly broke copyright law here.