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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.

    Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.

    If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.



  • It’s called home realm discovery. It’s common in business apps though it’s usually used with email & password logins not username & password logins.

    It’s done that way to support federated logins. Larger companies will often used a single sign on solution like Okta or Azure AD. Once the user’s email address is entered it checks the domain against a list of sign on providers for each domain and redirects the user to their company’s federated login if it finds it there instead of prompting for a password.

    This has several benefits:

    1. The user doesn’t have mutiple passwords to remember for different apps. Which is know to result in users either reusing passwords or writing down passwords somewhere.

    2. When an employee quits or is terminated the company only needs to disable their account in their company directory and not go into potential dozens of separate web apps to disable accounts.

    3. The software vendor never receives the password, if the vendor’s system is compromised they don’t even have password hashes to leak. (Let alone plain text or reversibly encrypted passwords)

    Websites that work that way are (usually) doing it right. If that doesn’t work with your password manager, you should (probably) blame the password manager not the website.


  • The challenge with green hydrogen is it needs to be created using green electricity. If the electricity isn’t green you’re still burning fossil fuels to create it. Creating hydrogen from fossil fuel generated electricity and then burning it is less efficient than just burning fossil fuels directly and results in a net increase not decrease in carbon emissions.

    As we build additional green electricity generation, it’s currently more impactful to use that to lower grid demand on fossil fuel generated electricity than to use it make green hydrogen. If it’s used to make green hydrogen instead, we’re only delaying the day we finally eliminate fossil fuel electricity generation, which again benefits the fossil fuel industry.

    Only at some point in the future, when we’ve completely eliminated fossil fuels from the electric grid, and have created an excess of green electricity generation does green hydrogen even become possible to create.

    And even assuming we can achieve that some day. It’s less efficient to use electricity to create hydrogen to power vehicle than to use batteries. Anything that can be converted to connect to the grid directly or run on batteries is better doing that than running on hydrogen.

    It’s not completely crazy… there are some potential use cases for green hydrogen that would make sense in some theoretical future where there’s an abundance of green electricity generation, allowing replacing of fossil fuels where more direct forms of electrification isn’t viable. Aircraft in particular come to mind here since hydrogen stores much more energy per kg than batteries, which are currently too heavy to be viable in aircraft.

    But almost all promotion of hydrogen today, including green hydrogen, is either more greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry or the work of well meaning idealists that have unwittingly become their shills.

    Green Hydrogen is not a solution for the vast majority of things it gets presented as a solution to.




  • Lived in a house that had a heat pump with resistive electric heat as a backup in Canada. Never noticed a significant difference between that and other houses I’ve lived in that had natural gas furnaces.

    Aux heat would kick whenever it was below about -5°C. That house would be about 20 years old now and had decent insulation for the location and age. It never really felt like the furnace struggled to keep the house warm, or was running all the time.

    Cost wise it didn’t seem significantly better or worse than natural gas. It was definitely using more juice in the winter when there was a cold snap, but it wasn’t crazy amounts. The electric bill was actually highest in the summer when the heat pump was cooling.




  • The exhaust from a typical ICE wouldn’t have enough pressure to inflate a tire, so you’d need a compressor. Of course if you had a compressor you’d just use clean air.

    If for some reason you used a compressor to compress exhaust gases to fill a tire, it would mostly be the same as filling with air at first.

    Exhaust gas is mostly a mix of carbon dioxide and and water vapour, with small amounts of oil residue, and other organic compounds. The water vapour will condense as it cools likely leaving some liquid water in the tire, which won’t cause immediate issues but will cause vibrations which will accelerate wear not just on the tire but possibly the entire suspension.

    The organic compounds will cause the rubber to break down over time and the tire will wear out sooner.



  • It’s ridiculously unusual for a board to actually fire a CEO. Usually if the board thinks a new CEO is needed, even if the CEO doesn’t agree with the decision, there’s a transition plan announced the CEO “stepping down”, or “steps aside”, of the “next phase of growth” or whatever. It has a massive positive spin on it and the departing CEO is paid a ridiculous severance to go along with the plan publicly.

    It’s very negative press to have to outright fire a CEO. Especially in a case like this when the CEO saw the company through the kind of growth that every startup has wet dreams about.

    Something huge happened, and the world is speculating rampantly about what that was.


  • Climate change isn’t caused by just using fossil fuels to make a product, it’s caused by burning fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gasses, (primarily carbon dioxide and methane), into the environment.

    Asphalt is a problematic material, but not so much because it’s made from oil. It’s problematic because we burn fossil fuels to harvest the raw crude and to generate the energy needed to refine crude into asphalt. The carbon in the asphalt itself remains sequestered there and doesn’t contribute to the greenhouse effect as long as it isn’t burned later.

    If we figured out how to extract crude and generate the vast amount of energy needed to manufacture asphalt without actually burning fossil fuels we’d eliminate the vast majority of asphalt’s impact on climate change.

    In fact it’s been shown in a lab that it’s possible to make asphalt from CO2. It’s currently cost prohibitive to do so, but in theory asphalt could be part of the solution to climate change.

    Now Asphalt does have other environmental issues, like leaching toxic chemicals into the soil and water table and the fact that it’s usually black which absorbs more the sun’s radiation than almost anything else which would reflect more of the sun’s energy back out into space. But those problems aren’t necessarily solved by using non-petroleum based bioasphault, nor are they unsolvable with bitumen based asphalt.

    About 20% of a barrel of oil gets made into products like plastics or foam, that’s not what’s causing climate change. What causing climate change is the 80% that gets refined and burned for cheep energy. So it’s less “Just stop oil” and more “Just stop burning oil”