There are so many issues to consider. Who makes the motor? Who makes the battery? Will you still be able to buy that battery in 5 years? Will it still work if the company that sold it goes out of business? You can get cheap Chinese e-bikes for 1/4 the cost of American-branded e-bikes. But, sometimes the American ones are just Chinese ones with a sticker slapped on that doubles the price.

From what I’ve been able to figure out, motors made by Bafang and batteries made by Bafang or Samsung are thought to be ones that should still be around in a few years.

Then there are all the other issues to consider: hub drive or mid-drive? Pedal assist or throttle? Rear derailleur, internally geared hub, or continuously variable transmission?

I’ve been thinking of getting one and am ready to part with my money, but I can’t justify the price of some of the North-American / European labelled bikes, but don’t want to waste money on a Chinese one that might only work for a few weeks.

My experience is that games run just as well (if not better) in Linux. I’m also running Bazzite. The difference is that I think I had an nVidia driver issue once in about 10 years under Windows with this computer and hardware combo. It was such a rare occurrence that I assumed my card was dying, but it turns out that the next update fixed all the problems.

Meanwhile, the time between hitting a driver bug in Linux is measured in months. For a long time I couldn’t play SNES games with an emulator because something about how it initialized the display (on systems with 2 monitors attached to the card) caused the driver to completely lock up.

I’ve run modern AAA games with no issues, but using an emulator to play an old SNES game caused the driver to lock up. Apparently it has something to do with running 2 different screens? It’s definitely not just using advanced features or games that push the envelope.

When I was running Windows for games and Linux for other things, I think I had an nVidia driver problem once in something like 10 years. Once I switched to Linux completely (with the same hardware) the driver issues are frequent. This is using Bazzite so it’s a base system that has been assembled for all nVidia Bazzite users, not a quirk of my particular setup.

It’s basically what you’d expect when 95% of nVidia GPU users (at least home users) are running Windows, and only 5% are on Linux. Windows gets a lot more QA effort, and Linux gets a lot more bugs.

This is why I’m annoyed that AMD hasn’t released a high-end graphics card for 4 years. I don’t want to build a brand new gaming PC with a 4 year old GPU.

No, you’re thinking of when milk fat is evenly mixed in, when your eyes are different colours that’s homeostasis.

School is one of those words that leads to semantic satiation (or maybe just spelling satiation) quickly for me. The more frequently I write it, the more it seems that I can’t possibly be spelling it right.

You sure ewe don’t mean homophone?

Yes

You can literally hear the power going through the lines.

Which is the problem. People get scared of them, even though there’s no danger, but they convince themselves there is, and they get a Nocebo Effect.

This has been widely tested. Some people claim that WiFi makes them ill, so they did tests. The tests showed no difference in people’s reported symptoms when they were next to a real WiFi router that was emitting WiFi signals vs. a sham WiFi router that was designed to look real but didn’t have any active radio components.

They’ve also done studies that show that exposure can result in symptoms. Exposure to media claiming WiFi is dangerous, that is.

He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person

Which can’t be explained by an unfocused eye. They do a lot of speculating to come up with a reason why he could possibly see something out of the corner of his eye. But, that’s only the physical part of it. It doesn’t explain why he might think that whatever he was seeing was “a figure” and moved like a person.

That’s like saying that ghosts can be explained by wearing glasses with dirty lenses, then going into detail about how dirty lenses can cause someone to see something that isn’t there, while ignoring the elephant ghost in the room. Except it’s even worse because a smudge on your glasses causing you to “see something that isn’t there” is really easy to test and barely needs an experiment to confirm it’s true. But, low frequency waves causing someone to see something that isn’t there isn’t something that has been tested. It’s pure speculation.

So, pure speculation that low frequency waves can cause someone’s eyes to blur in such a way that the corner of their glasses is mistaken as something that isn’t there. No proof that has happened or can happen, just speculation.

Then ignoring the elephant in the room that just because someone might not see clearly if their eye is vibrating, that is somehow magically interpreted as a figure moving like a person, which they interpret as a ghost.

There’s a humongous jump there from “a certain frequency might cause the eyes to wiggle” to “and therefore that’s why he saw a ghost”.

Ok, that’s a paper that attempts to explain the feeling that a building might be haunted. There’s nothing in there about causing people to hallucinate. They talk about the supposed “resonant frequency of the eye”, but then they say:

The resonant frequency is the natural frequency of an object, the one at which it needs the minimum input of energy to vibrate. As you can see from above, any frequency above 8 Hz will have an effect and some sources quote 40Hz

If the values are that vague, then there is no resonant frequency. There may be frequencies that transmit vibrations to the eye, but with a big enough speaker you can cause anything to vibrate.

The closest the get to hallucinations is to say that "the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious “smearing"of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.’s spectacles.” So, no hallucinations, just some blurry vision that might vaguely count as an excuse for seeing a ghost if your eye is vibrating significantly. Notice that that’s all just speculation, saying “this seems like it could be possible” rather than actually testing for that hypothesis.

It’s pretty clear it’s a BS condition. Jimmy even tests him. It doesn’t mean that Chuck is lying, it’s also pretty clear from the show that it’s some kind of Nocebo Effect. He doesn’t want to believe he’s a bad person, so his body effectively comes up with this “solution” to the problem.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

It says “these industrial sites” so it’s making a generalization, it says “as high as” so that’s presumably the maximum they measured at one of those many sites. They also talk about high and low frequency sound, so it may not be the infrasound that is “loud” but the high frequency sound, which doesn’t as easily travel through the ground, etc.

Because sound tends to follow an inverse square law, if they measured that 96 dB at 100m from the sound’s source, it could be just 2% of that level at 800m away.

So, that “96 dB” figure needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The figure as actually measured in some person’s home might be a tiny fraction of that amount.

Again, it doesn’t mean there’s no problem, just that it needs some further investigation.

Anxiety, nausea and sleep problems can be caused by many things. One of those things is believing that a nearby datacenter is making you ill.

Sure, investigate it and see if it is actually happening. But, do a proper double-blind study.

I take this personally because my mother is a conspiracy nut who thinks that everything is making her ill: wifi, chemtrails, street lights, electricity, gluten… if she heard about infrasound she’d add it to the list of things that are hurting her health.

That’s right. Even if the person won the lawsuit it doesn’t mean the science is true. It’s one really frustrating thing about the legal system, sometimes people win lawsuits based on absolutely terrible BS science. A persuasive lawyer has to convince a jury that something is true, not convince a scientist who knows about that field.

Exposure to this level of infrasound

What level is that?

[citation needed]

I fully believe that at times infrasound can result in anxiety, nausea, etc. But, in 2026 so can reading the news. So can thinking that your health is being affected by a datacenter, resulting in you worrying and losing sleep.

This whole thing about the “resonant frequency of the eye” and that causing someone to hallucinate… that smells like utter BS. A much more likely explanation in a basement is carbon monoxide.

Yeah. It’s just that the salaries of the voice actors are well known, and probably represent a large fraction of the cost per episode.

I really wonder what the writers’ salaries are. That was what made the Simpsons so good, with so many quotable lines in the first 8 or 9 seasons. My guess is that the writers make a tiny fraction of what the voice actors make. If they paid writers $400k per episode, could they attract superstar writers who could re-capture the magic of those early seasons?

From the Wikipedia page:

The Simpsons has been named by Time as the greatest television series of the 20th century.

The 20th century ended in 1999. The last Simpsons episode from the 20th century was season 11 episode 9. You can see it was already in decline by then. The vast majority of the episodes were released in the 21st century. We’re a quarter of the way to the 22nd century and they’re still releasing them. But, it hasn’t been good since the last century even if Homer’s probably saying “it’s just a little slimy, it’s still good, it’s still good!” (S7E5, 1995)

Despite the colours, red isn’t “bad”, it’s a 5 to 6 out of 10. It’s mediocre.

In the early seasons the show was something you planned around because you didn’t want to miss it. It would be what everyone was talking about the next day (at least for certain age groups). Now it’s a show that probably people put on while they doom scroll.

If you look at lists of quotes from the Simpsons there are a lot of memorable ones:

• “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords”
• “You don’t win friends with salad”
• " I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was, and now what I’m with isn’t it. And what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me."
• “Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter”
• “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos”
• “My cat’s breath smells like cat food”

But, none of those is from a 2 digit season number, and we’re now on season 37? 38?

What’s especially amazing is how the quality and cost are going in opposite directions. The good seasons, 1-8, were ones where the voice actors were paid $30k per episode. 1998-2004 they were paid $125k per episode. That’s about seasons 9-15 when the quality was already clearly dropping. Since around 2013 they’re making about $400k per episode. That’s season 24 or so, and look at how much the quality has already dropped. It’s just amazing to me that it’s profitable to have a show that’s that expensive to make and yet is so consistently mediocre these days.