TranscendentalEmpire

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Has less to do with companies who rent and more to do with ones whom finance the construction of the building in the first place. It was a lot more common back in the day for companies like sears to build sky scrapers as a vanity project that they could park money into. Trump wasn't the only person in the real estate market advantageously overvaluing his properties.

Pretty much every sky scraper devoted to office space is a huge waste of money, and are rarely ever utilized anywhere near their capacity. It why so many NYC government agencies were located in the world trade center. The local government was basically helping achieve some of the capacity they approved for the project, helping make the wtc look more utilized that what it was.

There used to be a pseudo economic model that was surprisingly consistent. That anytime the newest tallest building in the world was announced, there would be some sort of recession within a couple years. It was seen as a sign that corporations were running out of productive places to stick their earnings.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

I mean depending on how deep they are they wouldn't even really need that. I imagine you could just drop an anchor and drag it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean EEG stuff,

For the most part, yes. If we're just needing enough input to control something like a mouse, then there's no real reason to go with an invasive implant. You can pull the same data from eeg and ocular tracking.

Do you mean counteracting potentially deadly seizures, or causing them?

It would be counteracting seizures.

BCI, or your opinion? Maybe like, challenges, what you see as being the most promising stuff, that sort of thing?

The problem with BCI is that there's just not a lot of uses for them. The quadriplegic community is already small, and their range of cognitive ability runs the gamut. So creating a cbi that is useful to the entire patient population is going to be tough. The largest obstacle would be patient education, and training care takers.

This is part of the reason I discount Musks interest in BCI as medical device, there's just no money in it. I think his only real motivation is to sell it to gullible wealthy people.

Another inherent problem with BCI is that it's not seamless. It takes a lot more concentration to operate a mouse with your mind than it does with your body. People don't really understand how much of their movement is handled by their spinal chord instead of the brain.

People have a hard time utilizing interactive spaces when we separate them from physical input. Which is why a lot of people struggle with VR,. When your physical senses like proprioception don't reflect the interactions the same as our visual senses we can become physically ill.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Are other forms of BCI not permanent?

No, typically they're just sensors on a cranial harness.

Though, I kind think it being temporary would kind of be an upside, for the most part, since that would prevent scar tissue buildup on the brain, and other potential problems like that.

Yes, there's no real advantage to making it permanent other than convenience. However this convenience is imo massively outweighed by the very real possibility of meningitis. It's crazy that they got approval to transect the blood brain barrier for an implant. Other implants do this, but that risk is being weighed against things like potentially deadly seizures, not mild convenience.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

like 95% of people who are paid to beat the market perform worse than index funds over any period greater than 5 years.

Not too crazy to imagine, especially with how the markets have been behaving recently. Index funds have been having crazy returns the last year or so.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

brokerage account and they recommend stuff but they are your age or younger, you should definitely listen with a grain of salt. I lost a good 5 years of income listening to the guy from fidelity. "It's definitely time to invest!"

Yeah, never give anyone the ability to completely manage your brokerage account. Most investment brokers are just gambling addicts that get to spend other people's money. If they are telling you they can get you returns much greater than index funds or a decent ETF.....they aren't telling you of the potential risk.

My advise to younger people is just to take advantage of any tax mitigation like a IRA or 401k, invest in index funds, and most importantly ......don't look at it too much.

People tend to panic when they see a long term investment dip below their original purchasing price, but it's important to realize that losses aren't realized until you sell. The market will fluctuate, but the likelihood of a company recovering at some point in the next 20 years is pretty high. Just be patient and don't buy overspeculated stock.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Tbh it's not very hard, just get a brokerage account with someone like fidelity or even Robinhood. As far as picking stock, there's no correct way that's applicable to everyone. Oftentimes people who obsess over crunching numbers and doing lots of research, will rarely make more than if they just bought index funds.

Long-term investments are a lot more about how much and how long you can invest, vs what you invest in. In general, I tend to buy stock in companies who I believe to be undervalued, particularly if it's been devalued in reaction to the media and not something like a bad quarterly.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (5 children)

These people are literally working on tech to help quadriplegics.

I mean..... That's the claim, but there's no real explanation on how their implant could help quadriplegics more so than the current computer brain interface we've had for +10 years.

Computer brain interfaces have been around for years, the only novel idea is making it into a permanent implant. That being said, novel doesn't necessarily mean good.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

The whole jet fuel can't melt steel beams theory also requires a flawed understanding of thermodynamics to work. A fire's fuel is just part of the equation needed for temperature output. A coal fire will naturally burn around 900c, but with the proper air flow behind it, you can increase it to 1200c.

The theory is also dependent on people assuming that jet fuel is the primary combustion material, instead of what it really was, the primary ignition source. It was the early 00's, a time before the age of digital storage, and that building had literally tons of paper in their storage rooms. Office fires are known to get very hot, there are plenty of pictures on the Internet of steel joists in an office building "melting" from just a regular old paper fire.

Finally, there is a difference between heat and temperature. Heat is the rate of which energy is transferred to material, temperature is how hot or cold something is. Meaning a large cooler fire may transfer more heat energy to a structure than a smaller hotter fire. It's the equivalence of throwing a bar of iron in a bonfire compared to heating one end of the iron bar with a torch.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Nah you're good, sabolich was recently sold to Hanger orthotics and prosthetics. You probably visited when John Sabolich was still running it, and actually still doing research. His son Scott took it over and just made it a cash cow.

But yeah, lots of these types of articles that make claims to "the first to" are only pedantically correct. It's usually just doing the same as someone else attempted 15 years ago, but this time with a fantasy new surgery that automatically predicates it from being meaningfully utilized anywhere.

Looks like this is similar to what you saw at sabolich years ago, but paired with nerve reintegration. Pretty sure orthotics and prosthetics is simultaneously one of the most over hyped and least understood topics covered by "scientific journalism". Every article Ive read about my field on social media has been comically inaccurate.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

You probably just have a little bit of an anterior pelvic tilt. The boney prominence that you are talking about, the one that is more commonly visible in women is just the iliac crest.

Everyone have them, but your weight and pelvic tilt determine how visible they are. Women typically have up to 4 degrees of anterior tilt, while most men are in a more neutral position.

Men can have anterior tilts and be perfectly healthy, but It can also be a symptom from anything from bad posture to a limb length discrepancy. It should be fine, but I would consult a physician if you start losing range of motion or start having hip or lower back pain.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I wasn't even that critical in my statement. I was just explaining how switching to nuclear power would require us to combat the NIMBY attitude that killed it in the first place, and that political capital would probably be spent more wisely elsewhere.

I'm fine with nuclear power, but as you said it's not exactly the silver bullet a lot of people claim it to be.

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