fugacity

An unfinished civil war in which the Republic of China lives on in a tiny island? Damn, must have been a real stalemate for the KMT and Communist Party.

For the record, I absolutely believe China would attack Taiwan, when they think they are ready. And you don’t have to take my word for it: what of all those missiles Taiwan posseses? Are they pointed towards or away from the strait?

As for being left alone, the only reason Taiwan can live in peace and prosperity is because of its strategic semiconductor fabs and the publicity it generates. Yes, the publicity it generates puts us the forefront of global conversations and keeps Taiwan safe.

Now, if you really are Taiwanese, if China and Taiwan are one, do you really think China would let TSMC do as they please and not immediately takeover the company for SMIC? Or do you not remember what happened to Jack Ma? You think Taiwan can vote how it wants while still being part of China? Taiwan is part of China just as much as Ukraine is part of Russia.

By the way, last I checked in December when I visited my parents, rubber ducks and Winnie the Pooh aren’t banned in Taiwan. I wonder about Hong Kong and its one country two systems ;)

Lmao no that’s not the status quo of Taiwan. Or maybe I should ask you what happened to Hong Kong?

his edit does not assume that; it’s the cleanest way of doing the problem

P(failure second try)=(2/3)^2 since you can eliminate one choice but 2 others are still wrong.

To total:
P(failure)=(3/4)^2*(2/3)2=1/4
1-1/4=0.75

So the probability of passing is 0.75

Edit:
Remark: this problem is elegant if you attempt to calculate the passing as the complement of failure rather than enumerate all successes. Shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes with a clear head if you know the correct approach. If this was an college level intro probability exam question, it should be done the fast way since it’s meant to eat up your time otherwise.

P(passing) = 1- P(failure)
P(failure) = P(failure first try)*P(failure second try)
P(failure first try)=(3/4)^2
P(failure second try)=(gonna post in reply)

Hence my apology for the imprecise language. I meant what you said by social democracy, not a social economic system. Anyways, if we’re being pedants, there are no true socialists or capitalists in today’s markets. They’re all mixed-market economies.

When I say socialist (and what is more accurately social democracy), I first think of healthcare, then I think of transit, then of education, and then of utilities. These are things that the US certainly could do better.

I think the reason is important. If you stick to something because you think it is the right thing to do, that is conviction. If you stick to something because you think you must continue as you have already invested effort into, that is sunk cost. The point that I’m trying to make, that perhaps I have not worded well, is that you must act with conviction, because if you do not do what you think is right, you either not do anything, or do what you think is wrong. Sure, you may be wrong at the time, and you should be open to reflection, and not be prey to sunk cost.

But coming up with convenient excuses to avoid doing what you think is inconvenient but right is not how leaders behave.

And in this context (if that is what you mean), it is definitely not evident that supporting Ukraine is a strategy that won’t work.

Forgive my previous imprecise language, but isn’t this merely a matter of semantics? I was under the impression that the major countries in Europe are socialist (or if you prefer, social democracies, hence what I meant but European “socialism”), and they drive policy in the EU. But as the top comment said, they have agency to do things on their own behalfs.

See but that’s the problem. Instead of pointing out specifics and being clear you’ve said a whole lot of nothing and just gone back to your echo chamber. Shame on you, not for disgreeing with me, but acting holier-than-thou, walking away in arrogance with your nose held high.

Call me delusional, but despite electing an agent of Russia the previous election cycle, I think the US still managed to give more aid to Ukraine when they needed it. Don’t tell me that the EU pledged more aid than the US has after the fact. If the US didn’t put its foot forward in the first place I have a real hard time believing the EU would have done anything. And yeah, maybe we shouldn’t be giving Isreal weapons to bomb the living shit out of Palestinian civilians. And Europe is entirely right when they call us out on it. But since when is Europe willing to accept refugees from Palestine? Their words don’t mean much to me. It’s always posturing and NIMBY and hoping someone else does it while acting superior.

For the record, the fact that Trump didn’t overthrow the government means that it’s not a dictatorship - need I remind you that Trump was 3 years ago? And anyways, despite how horrible of a person and leader Trump is, he somehow still had better foreign policy regarding China than Europe did.

If China invades Taiwan, what will Europe do? I have a hard time they’ll do anything but thank the heavens they had TSMC build a fab in Europe while conveniently waiting to see what happens: if Japan and the US are able to help Taiwan hold, they’ll open the floodgates, but otherwise they’ll turn the other way.

Yeah, moving forward might be the wrong way to put it. But I’m not impressed at all with bystanders that point fingers at people going the wrong way when they’re at least trying. And if the world wants to literally put their money where their mouth is, maybe they should be adopting the Euro instead of the US Dollar as their world reserve currency (why, if other countries hate our capitalism so much, are they so willing to eat our shit when we print money on their dime?)

If you move without conviction, then does it matter if you are right or wrong? You will never learn from your mistakes.

As an American, growing up I used to think so highly of Europe and their better socialist policies (I even wanted to move there), but honestly their spinelessness when dealing with dictatorships has really disillusioned me. Say what you will about the US military-industrial complex, or even how capricious our current aid situation is with Ukraine, but even when our international policy is clearly wrong or misguided, I do think we move forward with real conviction unlike Europe…

Well, if you count the corporations as people and give them votes proportional to their income, income does seem to be exceeding inflation. I’m sure in no time trickle-down economics will allow us poor folk to see some of that wealth. I for one certainly already see the wealth that my lovely landlady possesses.

Just like a few of the other posts, I honestly don’t get it. If they can’t sell your data and can’t serve you ads, then why would they want to spend money serving you for free? There’s so many people complaining how YouTube has a monopoly and how it’s not even that hard to run, but I seriously doubt these people. Transcoding video and distributing it worldwide while having automated moderation is not easy or cheap. If there were serious contenders in the space people would have moved on, and I don’t think it’s just the network effect that keeps YouTube as a dominant player here.

People despise ads, but then they want content for free. They use adblockers to bypass a primary revenue source for a website, then go all surprised Pikachu face when that website doesn’t welcome them. And then they get upset that they don’t want to be the product despite not willing to be a source of ad revenue. I’m willing to pay for YouTube premium (and other subscription models to get rid of ads), but a lot of people aren’t. And honestly, I really would rather those people simply leave the site. It would lower operating costs for YouTube (I don’t expect my subscription fees to go down but maybe their engineers will have more free time to work on features besides adblocker-blocking), and more people on different sites would lead to more competition.

If you aren’t willing to eat ads, and you aren’t willing to be the product, and you aren’t willing to pay a subscription, then why do you think you’re entitled to content?

Happy they got the Taiwan part correct at least.

I don’t know if I would see it as a pure money grab. Pretty sure game consoles, just like inkjet printers and the like are sold with zero or near zero profit (or even at a loss). The benefit the console manufacturer gains from the platform lock-in far outweighs whatever greed they might have trying to reap gains from the hardware. 10 year old hardware is roughly 30x slower in FLOPs, so we might be looking at a desire for better games or easier software development - I for sure would not envy the developer needing to target 10 year old hardware, though it’s not exactly unheard of.

Not that this comment is all that relevant to you, but here’s a wall of text for context:

The devil is probably in the details here. My assumption is that your denatured alcohol is referring to ethanol mixed with other toxic alcohols (such as methanol).

This can’t be 100% pure ethanol because it MUST contain denaturants to discourage drinking, otherwise it would not be denatured and would legally require an additional excise tax. In that case, you might find it as Everclear (190 proof or 95% or ethanol by volume at highest concentration). It can be close to 100% alcohol, of course, because methanol is an alcohol.

I HAVE seen (at least in the US) food grade USP purity ethanol for sale (with additional cost due to excise tax inclusion) that’s at least 99.5% pure. I have also seen 99% purity isopropyl alcohol (IPA). My point in the reply to the original content is that it’s not accurate. Distillation of binary mixtures results in azeotropes that prevent purity of more than 91% IPA (by volume) and ~95% ethanol. But there’s ways around it such as adding a third solvent for a ternary mixture, salting out (shown in some chemistry demonstrations), changing the pressure of distillation, or using molecular sieves to remove water content. Alternatively, you could use freeze distillation, or even zone melting if you chose to freeze the mixture instead of boiling it. In fact, once you PASS the azeotrope, you can actually distill at standard pressure albeit what you want and don’t want in the column would switch places.

Getting the last few percent of water out of it definitely costs more, but it’s not something so hard that you can’t find commercially available alcohol solvents at purities above the azeotropic point. I know this is the case since I’ve acquired them for home use and have used them in multiple lab settings before. The annoying part for those who REALLY don’t want much water in the solvents is that at that point your solvents are hygroscopic and unless sealed properly or kept in a desiccated environment they’re gonna tend to absorb water back toward the azeotropic point.

Ethanol is similar to IPA in solvent properties but they won’t be the same. I don’t have enough wet lab experience to give a good answer in this regard though. If you’re able to take things apart, I’ve cleaned PCBs the Louis Rossmann way, which is with Branson EC solution and sonication. Drying is really the most important step there ;)

That’s mostly correct but I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. Distillation is useless at the azeotropic point but ternary mixtures are used to break the azeotrope. Once you move past the azeotrope you can continue distillation to high purity. You could also do pressure swing distillation but my guess (even though I’m not exactly a chemical engineer doing unit operations for a living) is that it wouldn’t be economical. Of course, getting “100%” pure anything is really a different story…