Haha, your reply beat out mine by only a minute.

This does not agree with what the Social Security Administration has published:

Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?

A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

For the historical questions, I don’t really have answers, especially where it involves departures from the Western world. I did, however, briefly touch up on Islamic banking, which I’ve always found intriguing as the Islamic faith does not permit charging interest on loans, viewing it as usurious. I’m informed that Christianity also had a similar prohibition on usury, but apparently it fell due to the need to fund the constant wars in Europe.

I’m not really seeing the difference in feudalism except a members only kind of participation with a crony pool of inbreds, not all that different than the billionaires of today.

I think the important distinction insofar as stock markets is that the crony pool of inbreds have access, but so too does the commoner. Well, the middle-class commoner usually. And we’ve seen David-vs-Goliath cases where the commoners put up a decent fight against the inbreds’ institutions; the whole GameStonk fiasco comes to mind. An equivalent economic upset would have been wholly impossible at any point during any feudal period in history.

What are the idealist or futurist potential alternatives between the present and a future where wealth is no longer the primary means of complex social hierarchical display? My premise is that basing hierarchical display on the fundamental means of human survival is barbaric primitivism.

From conversations I’ve had previously, possible answers to that question are presented in the works of Paul Cockshott, author of Towards A New Socialism. I’ve not read it, but friends in Marxist-Leninist parties have mentioned it. The Wikipedia page, however, notes that it’s an economics book, which could be fairly technical and difficult to read. Sort of like how Das Kapital is more-or-less a textbook, in contrast with how Wage Labour And Capital was meant for mass consumption.

Wealth extraction neglects the responsibility of the environment and long term planning.

True. The cost to the environment is not “internalized”, to use the technical term. Hence, it doesn’t need to be paid for, and is thus “free real estate”. Solutions to internalize environmental harm include carbon taxes or cap-and-trade. But the latter is a lukewarm carbon tax because it only looks at the end-result emissions, rather than taxing at the oil well, so to speak.

I’m curious how humanity evolves in a distant post scarcity future but without becoming authoritarian or utopian/dystopian

Might I recommend The Three-Body Problem and the trilogy overall by Liu Cixin? This phenomenal hard scifi work describes a space-faring future where the human species faces a common, external threat. After all, much of today’s progress was yesterday’s scifi. So why not look to scifi to see what tomorrow’s solutions might be. It’s no worse than my crystal ball, which is foggy and in need of repair.

If you’re in the USA, I cannot understate how useful it may be to refer to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), a resource which I believe has no direct comparison:

How can I learn about an occupation that is of interest to me?

The Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) provides information on what workers do; the work environment; education, training, and other qualifications; pay; the job outlook; information on state and area data; similar occupations; and sources of additional information for more than 300 occupational profiles covering about 4 out of 5 jobs in the economy.

As for answering the question, anecdotal conversations I’ve had suggest that the trades (eg glazier, electrician, plumber) in the USA are promising fields, since while the nature of the job might change with different needs, people still require electric wires and piped water. But the OOH could give you more specific outlooks for those specific trades.

I was once told that plumbers can make very serious sums of money, even if they’re only ever installing supply-side piping. That is to say, the plumbing for water supply, as compared to drainage or sewer pipe, which are generally perceived as less appealing.

For the benefit of everyone else who didn’t recognize the initialism ERP, I think it’s Enterprise Resource Planning software, which seems to be a suite of applications for managing a sizable business.

I’ll take a shot from the hip at this question, but note that I won’t add my customary citations or links.

The stock market is the paragon of property and trusts, contracts, corporations and law, and the capitalist socio-economic system. The very existence of the stock market implies a society that has some or most of these concepts.

For example, for shares to be traded, there generally must exist ownership rights upon the shares, distinct from the ownership rights that the company has of its own property. Or if not outright ownership of a share, then the benefit that a share provides (eg dividends). It also implies a legal system that will enforce these rights and the obligations of the company to its shareholders.

For a tradable company to exist, it must be organized/chartered as an entity distinct from any single person. This is different than the feudal days, when ventures would be undertaken “in right of the King” or some member of the nobility. The feudal method wouldn’t work for modern companies, or else the King/Duke/Count/whatever could stiff the shareholders by just taking all the earnings. The company still needs to be created by legal means, either an Act of Parliament/Congress, by letter patent from the Monarch, or the modern administrative method of applying to the state Secretary of State (USA) or Companies House (UK) as examples.

Even the structure of a for-profit tradeable company – when compared to a state-owned enterprise, a non-profit, a co-op, or an NGO or QUANGO – is a representation of the values inherent to capitalism. A company is obliged to use the shareholders’ funds – which is held by the company but is owed to the shareholders – to extract the greatest return. But this can come in many forms.

Short-term value from buying investments and quickly flipping them (eg corporate home buyers) is different than rent-seeking (eg corporate landlords) and is still different than long-term investments that actively work to build up the value (eg startup incubators, private wealth funds, Islamic banking, transit-owned adjacent property). If a for-profit company doesn’t have a plan to extract a return… they’re in hot water with the shareholders, with penalties like personal liability for malfeasance.

Another way of looking at the stock market is that if you have all the underlying components but don’t yet have a stock market, it would soon appear naturally. That is to say, if the public stock markets were banned overnight, shares would still trade but just under the table and without regulation. But if any critical part underpinning the markets stopped existing, then the market itself would collapse.

History shows numerous examples where breakdowns of the legal system resulted in market mayhem, or when corporate property is expropriated for the Monarch’s wars or personal use, or when funds invested into or paid out of companies is hampered by terrible monetary inflation.

As for what the stock market does, its greatest purpose is to organize investments into ventures. Historically, ventures were things like building a ship to sail to the New World and steal obtain goods to sell at home. Merchant ships were and are still very expensive, so few singular persons could afford it. And even if the could, the failure of the venture could be catastrophic for that person’s finances. Better to spread the risk and the reward amongst lots of people.

What was once the sole domain of the landed gentry and nobility, slowly opened to the nouveau riche during the Industrial Revolution(s), then in turn to everyday people… for better or worse. It’s now almost trivial to buy a share in any particular listed company, but just opening the stock market to everyone would have been chaotic at best. I think it’s NYSE that still has on-floor traders/brokers, but imagine if all shares in that market had to be traded in a single room, with no digital trading. It’s already quite lively on the trading floor today, now add all the trades from middle class Americans on payday. It would become physically impossible.

Likewise, a pure capitalist stock market would permit awful things like bribing journalists to write fake stories to crash a stock, then buy it for cheap. Or pump and dump scams. And would have no “circuit breakers” that halt a share during so-called flash crashes.

I’m reminded of a scene from the ITV show Agatha Christie’s Poirot in the episode “Appointment With Death”, where a wealthy woman is not only murdered but her business empire collapses because the murderer also spooks the markets as a double whammy, causing investors to panic and sell up. The relevant implications here is that despite her company not having changed its financial picture, it got cut up for scrap and thus lost most of its value, rendering the business worthless in the end. Companies are usually valued more as a going-concern, above what all its property put together would amount to. Where does that additional value come from? It’s the prospect of a return from this particular assemblage of resources.

Suffice it to say, the stock market is a lot of things. But I view it as a natural result of certain other prerequisites, meaning we can’t really get rid of it, so instead it should be appropriately regulated.

I think you’re spot on, since using a random power/torque/rpm calculator online, an 85 Nm mid-drive motor rotating at a reasonable crank cadence of 80 RPM yields a power output of 710 W. That’s just shy of the max power regulation in the USA for ebikes, at 750 W. And motors can definitely go faster than 80 RPM.

Mid-drive motors could probably be built with even more torque, but because electric motors maintain near-constant torque through most of their RPM range, the motor controller would have to perform more current limiting at the higher RPMs to stay under the legal power limits. So there’s less benefit, unless someone really badly wants more low-RPM torque.

At that point, though, other parts of the bicycle drivetrain might start disintegrating under such forces.

From an urban planning perspective, there are some caveats to your points:

A new downtown would make a subway very easy and cheap to build, you could cut and cover instead of tunnelling

Cut-and-cover will make shallow underground tunnels cheaper to construct in almost all cases irrespective of building in an old city center or as part of building a new city center from scratch. In fact, older pre-WW2 cities are almost ideal for cut-and-cover because the tunnels can follow the street grid, yielding a tunnel which will be near to already-built destinations, while minimizing costly curves.

Probably the worst scenario for cut-and-cover is when the surface street has unnecessary curves and detours (eg American suburban arterials). So either the tunnel follows the curve and becomes weirdly farther from major destinations, or it’s built in segments using cut-and-cover where possible and digging for the rest.

Cheeeaaap land for huge offices, roads, and even houses

At least in America, where agricultural land at the edges of metropolitan areas is still cheap, the last 70 years do not suggest huge roads, huge offices, and huge house lead to a utopia. Instead, we just get car-dependency and sprawl, as well as dead shopping malls. The benefits of this accrued to the prior generations, who wheeled-and-dealed in speculative suburban house flipping, and saddled cities with sprawling infrastructure that the existing tax base cannot afford.

Green field is just so cheap.

It is, until it isn’t. Greenfield development “would be short term appealing but still expensive when it comes to building everything”. It’s a rare case in America where post-WW2 greenfield housing or commercial developments pay sufficient tax to maintain the municipal services those developments require.

Look at any one municipal utility and it becomes apparent that the costs scale by length or area, but the revenue scales by businesses/households. The math doesn’t suggest we need Singapore-levels of density, but constant sprawling expansion will put American cities on the brink of bankruptcy. As it stands, regressive property tax policies result in dense neighborhoods subsidizing sprawling neighborhood, but with nothing in return except more traffic and wastewater.

Either these cities must be permitted to somehow break away from their failed and costly suburban experiments, or the costs must be internalized upon greenfield development, which might not make it cheap anymore.

Looking at the images you’ve attached, this appears to be an 8 ft wide by 6 ft tall fence. That’s a good amount of weight in just the wood, and there isn’t any part of the design that diagonally braces the frame, except the steel cable… which tore from its mounts.

My layman’s view is that you absolutely need diagonal wood elements, which should only be installed after unloading the fence, either by removing the boards or by propping up the wheel-end so the frame returns to being squared. If the wheel interferes with this, remove it for the time being.

But I think you’d still need the steel cable, and if that has broken from its originally designed mooring, then this gate is already compromised. You may have to start over with a new Adjust-A-Gate kit or repair the current one so the cable will mount to the steel parts, rather than the wood.

I would say to rectify the diagonal supports first, before doing anything with the hinges, since if the hinges were actually the root problem, this gate would have already fallen over. That said, it seems to me that such a wide gate might have called for more substantial hinges.

The other commenter’s suggestion to consider a pair of less-wide gates is also sound, if the goal is a minimal-fuss gate that will last at least a decade of additional sagging and weather.

commercial appliances didn’t take any stand-by measures to avoid “keeping the wires warm”

Generally speaking, the amount of standby current attributable to the capacitors has historically paled in comparison to the much higher standby current of the active electronics therein. The One Watt Initiative is one such program that shed light on “vampire draw” and posed a tangible target for what standby power draw for an appliance should look like: 1 Watt.

A rather infamous example of profligate standby power was TV set-top boxes, rented from the satellite or cable TV company, at some 35 Watts. Because these weren’t owned by customers, so-called free-market principles couldn’t apply and consumers couldn’t “vote with their feet” for less power-hungry set-top boxes. And the satellite/cable TV companies didn’t care, since they weren’t the ones paying for the electricity to keep those boxes powered. Hence, a perverse scenario where power was being actively wasted.

It took both carrots (eg EnergyStar labels) and sticks (eg EU and California legislation) to make changes to this sordid situation. But to answer your question in the modern day, where standby current mostly is now kept around 1 Watt or lower, it all boils down to design tradeoffs.

For most consumer products, a physical power-switch has gone the way of the dodo. The demand is for products which can turn “off” but can start up again at a moment’s notice. Excellent electronics design could achieve low-power consumption in the milliwatts, but this often entails an entirely separate circuit and supply which is used to wake up the main circuit of the appliance. That’s extra parts and thus more that can go wrong and cause warranty claims. This is really only pursued if power consumption is paramount, such as for battery-powered devices. And even with all that effort, the power draw will never be zero.

So instead, the more common approach is to reuse the existing supply and circuitry, but try to optimize it when not in active operation. That means accepting that the power supply circuitry will have some amount of always-on draw, and that the total appliance will have a standby power draw which is deemed acceptable.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the EU Directives since 2013 which mandate particular power-factor targets, which for most non-motor appliances can only be achieved with active components, ie Active Power Factor Correction (Active PFC). While not strictly addressing standby power, this would be an example of a measure undertaken to avoid the heating caused by apparent power, both locally and through the grid.

How were you measuring the current in the power cable? Is this with a Kill-o-watt device or perhaps with a clamp meter and a line splitter?

As for why there is a capacitor across the mains input, a switching DC power supply like an ATX PSU draws current in a fairly jagged fashion. So to stabilize the input voltage, as well as preventing the switching noise from propagating through the mains and radiating everywhere, some capacitors are placed across the AC lines. This is a large oversimplification, though, as the type and values of these capacitors are the subject of careful design.

Since a capacitor charges and discharges based on the voltage across it, and because AC power changes voltage “polarity” at 50 or 60 Hz, the flow of charge into and out of the capacitor will be measurable as a small current.

Your choice of measuring instrument will affect how precisely you can measure this apparent power, which will in-turn affect how your instrument reports the power factor. It can also be that the current in question also includes some of the standby current for keeping the PSU’s logic ICs in a ready state, for when the computer starts up. So that would also explain why the power factor isn’t exactly zero.

An outside description of Squatober: https://www.garagegymreviews.com/squatober

I like the concept of a month-long squat fitness challenge but I personally don’t jive with the notion of having to follow two Instagram accounts daily to get the next day’s program description. My life requires a bit more advance notice than that.

Agreed, it’s a very bad design. If your school speed limit covers most of the daylight hours on weekdays, is the implicit suggestion that it’s fine to drive faster on weekends and during nighttime? The street should be rebuilt to enforce the desired speed limits, not with paint or signs.

Oh, we’re talking about the letters on the glass. My bad lol

You may want to include a photo of the piece, ideally many photos from various angles.

But to be frank, unless you find someone within a max 1 hour’s travel distance, it’s not likely someone will be found who is also willing to take on this project. Wood furniture is, for all its pros and cons, heavy.

A few months ago, my library gained a copy of Cybersecurity For Small Networks by Seth Enoka, published by No Starch Press in 2022. So I figured I’d have a look and see if it it included modern best-practices for networks.

It was alright, in that it’s a decent how-to guide for a novice to set up sensible, minimum network fortifications. But it only includes an overview of how those fortifications work, without going into the additional depth needed to fine-tune or optimize them for specific environments. So if the reader has zero experience with network security, it’s a worthwhile read. But if you’ve already been operating a network with defenses for a while, there’s not much to gain from this particular text.

Also, the author suggests that IPv6 should be disabled, which is a terrible idea. Modern best-practice is not to pretend IPv6 doesn’t exist, but to assure that firewalls and other defenses are configured to handle this traffic. There’s a vast difference between “administratively reject IPv6 traffic in/out of the WAN” and “disable IPv6 on all devices and pray no one ever connects an IPv6-enabled device”.

You might have a look at other books available from No Starch Press, though.

I lost it when coming across this commit: https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/commit/67c68e6dc24f36b266427034d016fb86ef4d486c

Other commenters addressed some of the possible clearance issues, where a wider tire might interfere with the frame. But it seems to me that the discussion on tire/rim compatibility can be fleshed out.

To lay some background, a bicycle tire is essentially mostly a hollow rubber donut, but with the inward-facing “donut hole” walls supported instead by a pair of co-axial steel hoops, known as the beads. Thus, the beads define the inner diameter of the tire. When a tire is inflated, the air pressure will cause expansion in all directions. The tire’s beads and walls (ie casing) will hold their shape, but the air pressure will try to push the two beads apart. This is where the rim walls come into play: the rim walls prevent the beads from widening apart. With the air pressure fully contained in all directions, the wheel assembly can now support impressive loads relative to the weight of the rubber and metal.

So for a bicycle rim and bicycle tire to be compatible, the two most basic criteria must be met:

• the tire’s bead diameter must exactly match the rim’s “seated” diameter, ie at the bottom of the rim walls
• the beads must fit within the rim walls, being neither too narrow or too wide, such that the tire maintains its correct shape and that normal loads will not cause the beads to slip out of the rim walls

The first criteria is a strict match, so that’s easy to check. But the second criteria has some allowance for different tire widths on a given rim, or different rims for a given tire width. We can now look at what rims you have, and whether they’re compatible with your preferred tires.

It looks like your rims are Weinmann DP18 rims, which have a trade diameter of 700C and the narrowest part of the rim walls are 12.40 mm apart. I say “trade diameter” because no part of the rim actually measures 700 mm. Instead, rim/tire compatibility can only reliably be calculated using the ISO/ETRTO measurements, which are a pair of numbers that directly answer the two compatibility criteria from earlier.

The first number in the ETRTO system is the inner rim width, and the second number is the bead seat diameter, both in millimeters. So your rims would be universally identified as 12-622 or 13-622, since 622 mm is the actual circumference if you put a tape measure around the rim. The first number can be 12 or 13 because 12.40 mm could round up or down. Sub-mm precision does not substantially matter here.

Now we can look at your desired tires, which have a trade designation of 700x38c but they also give the ETRTO measurement of 40-622. Unlike rims, the trade designation does actually convey some measurable dimension of the tire, but these are irrelevant for tire/rim compatibility. See the spoiler below for more.

So we now know the rim is 13-622 and the desired tire is 40-622. Checking the first criteria, we see that the diameters (622 mm) are a perfect match. Great! But for the width, because there is an allowable range, we need to consult a width compatibility table. Some tire manufacturers will be more permissive while others are more conservative with their published tables. And there are often separate tables for road bikes versus MTB. But these tables won’t vary too substantially in their recommendations. Here are two tables, one from Continental and another from WTB.

Both tables indicate that for the 13 mm rim width column, the recommended tire widths are 18-27 mm (Continental) or 23-25 mm (WTB). Your preferred tire has an ETRTO width of 40 mm, which is way too far outside of the recommendations. So no, it doesn’t look like this tire can be safely mounted on your existing rims.

But what would happen if you tried it anyway? We can see from the table that a 40 mm tire should normally be mounted on a rim with widths 17-27 mm. So 13 mm would mean the tire beads will be squeezed closer together than designed. This means more of the tire’s tread will be wrapped up on the sides rather than facing down at the road. This also reduces the contact patch where the tire meets the road.

Finally, a wide tire on a narrow rim exerts more leverage that could pull the tire up and off the rim. This would happen if the bike is loaded sideways, such as leaning the bike to one side while riding straight, or when the rider leans further than the bike in a curve. The recommended values take these conditions into account, so exceeding the recommendations might still work day-to-day but fail during rarer conditions.

My recommendation is to pursue a new set of rims that can support tire widths suitable for your new environment. As the tables show, 13 mm rims are very limiting, but 17 mm rims are very permissive. Indeed, a 17 mm rim would actually allow you to mount your preferred tires (ETRTO 40-622) and possibly your existing tires (ETRTO 25-622 ?) too, if you wanted to.

I wish you good luck in your endeavors!

This is a good question and I don’t really know how this device would affect drafting and related manoeuvres. But if I had to guess, drafting behind a lead cyclist should still be beneficial, but the “zones” where it works might change.

So for example, the optimal distance lee-ward of a lead cyclist might become shorter or longer. Longer could mean more space to vie for that position directly behind the lead. But shorter might mean it’s impossible to draft without crashing into the lead.

Side-to-side drafting distances might also be affected, like how birds travel in a vee-shape. Maybe the vee would become wider? That might not be beneficial, though, if it’s so wide that it’s impossible to stay on the racecourse.

TL;DR: I have no idea, and aerodynamics are hard. That’s why I’m intrigued by the field.

My understanding is that it has to do with form drag – aka pressure drag – which results in vortices forming in the “separation region” directly behind an airfoil. Or in this case, a rider. Essentially, the swirling of air behind the rider is turbulent – which is why a hoodie might flop all over the place – and that causes energy to be lost.

This video on Nebula (and YT as well) describes pressure drag at about the 02m30s mark for a sphere. But this graphic from Skybrary also shows the problem:

By providing a smooth surface for air to “cling” to, where it would otherwise form vortices in the separation region, should reduce form drag, although it will cause additional induced drag (aka friction with the new surface). But induced drag scales with speed and at cycling speeds, that’s less a problem than it would be at airplane speeds.

A related drag-reducing device has been used for semi-truck trailers, and those have really been proven to reduce fuel consumption. Although the Wikipedia article does not describe in detail the aerodynamic principles at play.

For reference, the current Flag of Milwaukee, WI, which is quite busy:

As for the so-called “People’s Flag” – either with or without the city hall barreling into the harbor – it bears a small resemblance to the flag of Reno, NV, which is a pleasing flag.

Robert Lenz’s “Sunrise Over the Lake”, selected after a public competition, which prompted the humorous version with the city hall building.