skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Sloth World will not open following animal deaths in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    A planned International Drive attraction called Sloth World will not open following dozens of animal deaths, conservation groups said late Friday, as its 13 remaining sloths were placed in the care of animal experts at Central Florida Zoo & Biological Gardens.

    The 13 sloths arrived Friday and are in quarantine at the Sanford zoo, said Richard E. Glover, CEO of the zoo. Sloth World owner Ben Agresta reached out to zoo officials early in the week, Glover said.

    In a joint statement, the Sloth Conservation Foundation and the Sloth Institute, two international conservation groups that had been critical of the attraction, said Sloth World would be closing permanently. It had been announced in December as a guided, walk-through tour with an emphasis on conservation and education. It was initially scheduled to begin public tours in February, and reportedly has sold many advance VIP tickets at $49 each.

    [...]

    News reports last week established that at least 31 sloths have died since late 2024 in a converted warehouse operated by Sloth World about a mile from the planned public venue. The conservation groups said Friday that another 24 sloths obtained by Sloth World are unaccounted for.

    [...]

    Also on Friday, Orange County said a county building inspector had sought access to the Sloth World warehouse Thursday because it does not have a required permit to hold animals, but was unable to gain entrance despite four separate attempts.

    [...]

    In December, Agresta described to the Sentinel his plans for Sloth World as a home for guided walk-through tours among sloths living in a re-created rainforest setting. He said he expected to have at least 40 sloths in the building.

    But by that time, inspectors for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had collected details about the deaths of 31 sloths imported from Guyana and Peru via Miami International Airport in late 2024 and early 2025.

    The first 21 were taken to the warehouse, which had neither electricity nor water. Space heaters were added, but a tripped fuse kept the animals in the cold for at least one night. Later, 10 more sloths were delivered, but two were dead on arrival, and the others died due to health issues, an incident report said.

    FWC detailed the warehouse conditions in a report of an August 2025 inspection disclosed by Inside Climate News. Some information in the state report was provided by Peter Bandre, who — at the time — was Sloth World’s vice president and a business partner of Agresta. Bandre has since left Sloth World.

    2 votes
  2. Comment on Planned Parenthood is turning to services like Botox to stay afloat in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The Sacramento clinic is part of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, the largest Planned Parenthood affiliate in the country, covering Northern California and parts of Nevada.

    It has started offering a new set of services, ranging from Botox to IV hydration for skin rejuvenation, or for after a night of drinking, all of which patients pay for with cash. They can also request sedation for certain procedures, like the placement of an intrauterine device.

    The shift comes as Planned Parenthood faces financial uncertainty after President Donald Trump and Congress stripped funding for the abortion-rights organization as part of the tax and spending package passed last year. The cuts, which prevent Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform abortions from accepting Medicaid as payment for non-abortion services, are set to expire this summer. Congress could renew them for another year.

    The affiliate says about 75 to 80% of its patients are on Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program. Revenue from the new offerings could allow the affiliate to continue providing reproductive healthcare while it tries to fill the funding gap.

    [...]

    Planned Parenthood charges $9 per unit of Botox, which, depending on location, could be 25 to 50% cheaper than other providers.

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and state lawmakers have allocated hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding to Planned Parenthood and other organizations like it since the federal cuts, including $90 million in February.

    [...]

    The organization's leaders, though, say it isn't clear whether that will cover costs for core services, including cancer screenings, STI testing and contraceptive care, in the long run if Congress reinstates cuts.

    [...]

    While the affiliate offers Botox and IV hydration at select locations for now, it's exploring an expansion into cosmetic fillers and GLP-1 weight-loss treatments. Dalton says the new services could serve as a blueprint for other clinics trying to keep their doors open.

  3. Comment on The people do not yearn for automation in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The sort of lashing out you’re referencing is rarely well-targeted or calculated. Often minorities get the blame.

    The sort of lashing out you’re referencing is rarely well-targeted or calculated. Often minorities get the blame.

    3 votes
  4. Comment on The people do not yearn for automation in ~society

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Has that ever happened? Yes, conservatives sometimes win, and sometimes there has been talk about trickle-down theories of economics, but they talk about a lot of other things too. Proving...

    Has that ever happened? Yes, conservatives sometimes win, and sometimes there has been talk about trickle-down theories of economics, but they talk about a lot of other things too. Proving causation, that people actually believed a certain thing and acted on it, seems more difficult.

  5. Comment on How Ukraine is turning to renewables to keep heat and lights on in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Ukraine is revamping its power sector as rapidly as it can, not for climate protection but for energy security. “Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”

    Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”

    Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.

    [...]

    European countries are bankrolling most of Ukraine’s energy makeover, including all of the Mykolaiv solar installations. West of Kyiv, the city of Zhytomyr has plans to run entirely on renewables by 2050 with the help of the Rebuild Ukraine initiative, which is largely European funded. And in the Kyiv region and beyond, solar systems supported by the Solar Supports Ukraine program are keeping schools open during blackouts. A self-financed exception: Before the war began, the Sunny City cooperative in Slavutych, a town near the Belarus border, crowdfunded to create a solar power plant on the roofs of three municipal buildings.

    [...]

    Some self-sustaining energy zones combine renewables with conventional energy. The central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, for example, boasts five microgrids that combine local generation, including solar, gas, and hydroelectric power, with energy storage systems. Five major wind farms will join the energy mix in the next two years. In Khmelnytskyi, the national university’s 4,400-kilowatt microgrid includes a natural gas-fired cogeneration unit (it produces both electricity and heat), a 264-kilowatt solar array, a diesel-powered plant, and a gas-fired boiler house, which generates heat.

    [...]

    Before Russia seized territory that hosted more than half of Ukraine’s wind power capacity in 2014 and 2022, including major wind farms on the Sea of Azov coast, Ukraine had 34 wind parks, comprised of nearly 700 turbines. Since wind generation is so central to its decentralized energy strategy, Ukraine has strived to increase wind generation even in the midst of Russian attacks.

    Just 65 miles from the front, DTEK is installing the 500-megawatt Tyligulska Wind Power Plant, the first wind park ever built in a war zone. It is a crucial source of electricity in southern Ukraine and will supply 900,000 households when it’s finished. The country currently has 7 gigawatts of wind power in the pipeline that could be installed this year, according to Andriy Konechenkov, of the Ukrainian Wind Energy Association, should conditions on the ground allow it. The new turbines would more than triple the country’s current wind-power capacity.

    While the war has sidelined the rollout of utility-scale wind farms, solar installations atop households, businesses, and public institutions have continued at an unprecedented rate. Ukraine’s YASNO utility, which supplies electricity and gas to millions of Ukrainians, says its customers are snapping up the solar and storage packages that it offers. On sunny days, Ukraine even boasts energy surpluses.

    [...]

    “Individual consumers want to get off the grid any way that they can,” explains Andriy Martynyuk of Ecoclub, a Ukraine-based NGO that helps communities develop renewables. “It’s largely a grassroots phenomenon and a bit chaotic now,” he says. But Martynyuk expects the demand for renewables will further surge when state subsidies for fossil energy, which have priced Ukrainian energy significantly below market rates, are eventually phased out.

    This boom, of course, begs for storage options, and there, too, Ukraine has moved quickly. In 2024 and 2025, the country’s national grid operator invested in half a gigawatt of storage capacity — an impressive amount according to experts, who note that it is just under a quarter of Germany’s total storage supply. The battery projects that in Europe take two years to roll out, the Financial Times reports, take just six months in Ukraine.

    [...]

    In terms of a new, cutting-edge distributed energy system, Ukraine may be racing forward with the zeal of a new convert, but even the planned rollout of renewables in 2026 won’t keep most of the Ukrainian population safe from Russia’s depredations next winter. Wartime Ukraine has the will but not the financial resources to revamp its energy production on its own. The nation’s largest donor, the E.U., is already contributing nearly $200 billion to Ukraine’s budget for military expenditures and humanitarian aid, including energy. The speed with which Ukraine blankets its territory with distributed energy systems could make the difference between surviving another punishing winter — or succumbing to its cruelty.

    2 votes
  6. Comment on Single, solo, poor, woman gets $500k pre-tax, how to make the most of it? in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Unfortunately, this looks pretty grim without getting outside income somehow. What it comes down to is that making 50k a year for 10 years isn’t enough to go another 10 years without income. And...

    Unfortunately, this looks pretty grim without getting outside income somehow. What it comes down to is that making 50k a year for 10 years isn’t enough to go another 10 years without income. And then, what about retirement? Social security is based on how much you earned while working.

    If it supplemented income from a job, things look much better.

    Another possibility might be real estate? 500k might be enough to buy a duplex and rent half of it out. Not everyone is cut out to be a landlord, though.

    3 votes
  7. Comment on The people do not yearn for automation in ~society

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    No, because people are not that gullible. Nobody would believe them and they’d be right not to believe a promise about what an AI firm would do in the unlikely event that it had all the money in...

    No, because people are not that gullible. Nobody would believe them and they’d be right not to believe a promise about what an AI firm would do in the unlikely event that it had all the money in the world.

    I don’t know how many jobs will be eliminated, but the basic problem is that AI firms aren’t going to earn nearly enough from it to pay the affected workers much, even if they wanted to. That’s not how productivity improvements work. When labor is automated away, prices go down.

    1 vote
  8. Comment on The people do not yearn for automation in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I see populism working when politicians appeal to peoples’ preexisting prejudices. It’s targeting a weakness. It doesn’t mean advertising is effective for promoting anything you like.

    I see populism working when politicians appeal to peoples’ preexisting prejudices. It’s targeting a weakness. It doesn’t mean advertising is effective for promoting anything you like.

    2 votes
  9. Comment on The people do not yearn for automation in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    What I see when I encounter clips like this is the true gap between the tech industry and regular people when it comes to AI — the limit of software brain. Like I said, everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. They think this is a marketing problem. OpenAI just spent $200 million on the TBPN podcast because the company thinks it will help make people like AI more. Sam Altman has said so explicitly:

    Sam Altman: Oh, they are genius marketers and I would love to have better marketing. Somebody said to me recently that if AI were a political candidate, it would be the least popular political candidate in history. And given the amazing things AI can do, I think there’s got to be better marketing for AI.

    It feels like someone just needs to say this clearly, so I’m just going to do it. AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day! ChatGPT has 900 million weekly users, trending to a billion, and everyone has seen AI Overviews in Google Search and massive amounts of slop on their feeds.

    You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

    So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.

    Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge’s website is a database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data.

    [...]

    But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.

    Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for automation. I’m a full-on smart home sicko; the lights and shades and climate controls of my house are automated in dozens of ways. But huge companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t.

    AI isn’t going to fix that. Most people are not collecting data about every single thing that they do. And if they’re collecting any at all, it’s stored across lots of different systems — your email in Gmail, your messages in iMessage, your work schedule in Outlook, your workouts in Peloton. Those systems don’t talk to each other and maybe they never will, because there’s no reason for them to. Asking people to connect them all freaks them out.

    12 votes
  10. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    skybrian
    Link
    Do People Sincerely Believe Conspiracy Theories That They Endorse?

    Do People Sincerely Believe Conspiracy Theories That They Endorse?

    [...] In a survey of 1,044 Australians, we found that endorsement of six pre-existing conspiracy theories ranged from 10% to 19%, and that 7% of participants endorsed two that were clearly contradictory together. In addition, 10% of participants endorsed a highly bizarre raccoon army conspiracy theory that we invented, which we interpreted as evidence of insincerity. Endorsement of this conspiracy theory was a strong predictor of endorsing the pre-existing conspiracy theories, including the two contradictory ones together. Moreover, at debriefing, 13% of participants reported that they had responded insincerely in the survey, and this response was also a strong predictor of endorsing the pre-existing conspiracy theories, including the two contradictory ones together. Overall, our results suggest that surveys can produce inflated estimates of the prevalence of belief in conspiracy theories, which raises serious questions about how research on conspiracy theories—and misinformation more broadly—has frequently equated endorsement with belief.

    3 votes
  11. Comment on My journey to the microwave alternate timeline in ~food

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Marie T. Smith’s Microwave Cooking for One is an old forgotten book of microwave recipes from the 1980s. In the mid-2010s, it garnered the momentary attention of the Internet as “the world’s saddest cookbook”:

    To the modern eye, it seems obvious that microwave cooking can only be about reheating ready-made frozen food. It’s about staring blankly at the buzzing white box, waiting for the four dreadful beeps that give you permission to eat. It’s about consuming lukewarm processed slop on a rickety formica table, with only the crackling of a flickering neon light piercing through the silence.

    But this is completely misinterpreting Microwave Cooking for One’s vision. Two important pieces of context are missing. First – the book was published in 1985. Compare to the adoption S-curve of the microwave oven:

    [...]

    Second – Marie T. Smith is a microwave maximalist. She spent ten years putting every comestible object in the microwave to see what happens. Look at the items on the book cover – some are obviously impossible to prepare with a microwave, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Marie T. Smith figured out a way to prepare absolutely everything. If you are a disciple of her philosophy, you shouldn’t even own a stove. Smith herself hasn’t owned one since the early 1970s. As she explains in the cookbook’s introduction, Smith believed the microwave would ultimately replace stove-top cooking, the same way stove-top cooking had replaced campfire-top cooking.

    So, my goal is twofold: first, I want to know if there’s any merit to all of these forgotten microwaving techniques. Something that can make plasma out of grapes, set your house on fire and bring frozen hamsters back to life cannot be fundamentally bad. But also, I want to get a glimpse of what the world looks like in the uchronia where Marie T. Smith won and Big Teflon lost. Why did we drift apart from this timeline?

    [...]

    A lot of recipes in the book involve stacking various objects under, above, and around the food. For vegetables, Smith generally recommends slicing them thinly, putting them between a cardboard plate and towel paper, then microwaving the ensemble. This works great. I tried it with onion and carrots, and it does make nice crispy vegetables, similar to what you get when you steam the vegetables in a rice cooker (also a great technique). I’d still say the rice cooker gives better results, but for situations where you absolutely need your carrots done in under two minutes, the microwave method is hard to beat.

    But cardboard contraptions, on their own, can only take us this far. They do little to overcome the true frontier for microwave-only cooking: the Maillard Reaction.Around 150°C, amino acids and sugars combine to form dark-colored tasty compounds, also known as browning. For a good browning, you must rapidly reach temperatures well above the boiling point of water. This is particularly difficult to do in a microwave – which is why people tend to use the microwave specifically for things that don’t require the Maillard reaction.

    [...]

    In parallel, in 1953, chemists from Corning were trying to create photosensitive glass that could be etched using UV light, when they accidentally synthesized a new compound they called pyroceram. Pyroceram is almost unbreakable, extremely resistant to heat shocks, and remarkably non-sticky. Most importantly, the bottom can be coated with tin oxide, which enables it to absorb microwave radiation and become arbitrarily hot. This led to the development of the microwave browning skillet.

    [...]

    The key trick is to put the empty skillet alone in the microwave and let it accumulate as much heat as you desire before adding the food. Then, supposedly, you can get any degree of searing you like by following the right sequence of bleeps and bloops.

    [...]

    All in all, I think I believe most of the claims Smith makes about the microwave. Would it be possible to survive in a bunker with just a laptop, a microwave and a Cook’n’Pour SaucePan®? I think so. It probably saves energy, it definitely saves time washing the dishes, and getting a perfect browning is entirely within reach. There were failures, and many recipes would require a few rounds of practice before getting everything right, but the same is true for stove-top cooking.

    On the other hand, there’s a reason the book is called Microwave Cooking for One and not Microwave Cooking for a Large, Loving Family. It’s not just because it is targeted at lonely losers. It’s because microwave cooking becomes exponentially more complicated as you increase the number of guests. [...]

    9 votes
  12. Comment on What’s the best 3D-printed thing you have? in ~talk

    skybrian
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    The most impressive one is an accordion-like MIDI controller that I built 3 years ago, with a lot of 3D-printed parts. It's too awkward to be an everyday musical instrument though, so it sits in a...

    The most impressive one is an accordion-like MIDI controller that I built 3 years ago, with a lot of 3D-printed parts.

    It's too awkward to be an everyday musical instrument though, so it sits in a display case.

    I have ideas for a better one and occasionally I work on on it.

    7 votes
  13. Comment on Single, solo, poor, woman gets $500k pre-tax, how to make the most of it? in ~finance

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    A bond-only portfolio has other risks. Other than I-bonds, it's not going to keep up with inflation. Also, you do pay federal income tax on treasury bonds, though it may be deferred. They're only...

    A bond-only portfolio has other risks. Other than I-bonds, it's not going to keep up with inflation.

    Also, you do pay federal income tax on treasury bonds, though it may be deferred. They're only exempt from state and local taxes. (That doesn't apply to investments in an IRA, though.)

    9 votes
  14. Comment on Single, solo, poor, woman gets $500k pre-tax, how to make the most of it? in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Largely agreed. Except: It seems like there would be a lot more taxes if it she withdrew it all at once? I think that's reason to stick with a ten-year schedule for withdrawals, to make the taxed...

    Largely agreed. Except:

    There's very little chance they ever end up paying taxes either way, so it probably doesn't matter too much.

    It seems like there would be a lot more taxes if it she withdrew it all at once? I think that's reason to stick with a ten-year schedule for withdrawals, to make the taxed amount about the same every year. Then the taxes wouldn't be very much.

    So, investing what's in the IRA and building up savings outside the IRA (which might even be in a new IRA) can be considered separately.

    (Caveat: just going by my very cursory understanding of the rules.)

    2 votes
  15. Comment on Single, solo, poor, woman gets $500k pre-tax, how to make the most of it? in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This seems fairly reasonable as generic advice, but I’m wondering about the specifics: Whether any stock investments are appropriate at all depends on how you feel about risk. Someone who has a...

    This seems fairly reasonable as generic advice, but I’m wondering about the specifics:

    • Whether any stock investments are appropriate at all depends on how you feel about risk. Someone who has a fairly strong faith that stocks will eventually go up (the way Bogleheads do) can wait a few years if they go down for them to come back again. Other people worry more and would have a hard time dealing with that. It’s pretty easy to argue that stocks do eventually go up on average, but they can be down for years, and people have to decide for themselves whether they are sufficiently convinced to not worry too much in that situation.

    • Any money made inside the IRA is tax free (until withdrawal) and at least some of that money likely wouldn’t need to be withdrawn for years, so any stock investments that might grow a lot should probably be in the IRA?

    Certainly not all of it, though. At least the next few years of withdrawals should be invested conservatively so they can be withdrawn on schedule.

    Assuming the withdrawals have to be done in ten years, sticking to a fixed withdrawal schedule and then trying to build up some savings outside the IRA (not spending all the withdrawals) makes sense, and any money from a job will help to avoid having to spend it.

    2 votes