gattsuru
3d ago
Noel Canning's punt will come back to haunt us: Congress must be in a recess of 'sufficient length' to be a real delay, not just the three-day break of Noel Canning... but while booting the conservative-lead requirement that such appointments be to fill a space that became vacant during the recess. So Congress has since gotten into the habit of pro-forma 'sessions' that did nothing but reset the clock, hence why October and August look like this.
In theory, the President has some powers to force Congress to adjourn, in Article II, Section 3:
"... he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper;... "
But afaik this has never been used, a strict read of the text would only allow it to apply where Congress was actively unable to agree on a date of end of session, and because there are no requirements for how Congress can choose to assemble (being having to meet on the first Monday in December) I don't think it would actually work otherwise.
In practice, if Trump tries for force recess appointments, it's extremely likely that the Senate fight further on everything else, so it's a costly decision to make to even try.
gattsuru
3d ago
Most coverage focuses on his alleged sex scandal. Which is lurid, but has the dual problems of being having run too long while, when described in detail (some ludicrous), just isn't damning enough. About the best that can be said there is that Gaetz lacks Kavanaugh's charisma: even if someone tries something really stupid like trying to bring a Mann Act prosecution against him, everyone's just not gonna care.
The other side is that he's actively uncharismatic enough that I could see him having a tougher time getting confirmed than RFK. Gaetz is hated, and he's an easy man to hate.
More critically, my impression's that he hasn't shown the competence or leadership skills necessary to do much more than take a few retirements out at the belt. My opinion of the DoJ is low enough that 'wrecking ball' might well be an improvement over BATNA, but I'm skeptical that it's the only or best option available. We know what happens when Gaetz demands someone do something and they refuse, and it didn't work out great for Gaetz last time, and it's gonna be every single day at the DoJ. Maybe he wakes up once shoved into the role -- if the conspiracy theory is right and that sex scandal above was being assisted by the DoJ, he'd have a lot of reason! -- but my bet is no. He might be vengeful enough to do a Nunes, but it takes more than a grudge.
gattsuru
4d ago
The current HHS head is a HerbaLife fan.
I’d love to have better options, and I’m disappointed that the Trump one is this, but I think people badly underestimate how bad our institutions are.
gattsuru
4d ago
At least post-WPATH SOCv8, the standards of care no longer require an age of 18 or majority at any point, and have largely reframed talk therapy into a very strict division between required 'gender-affirming care' and prohibited 'conversion therapy'. At the risk of self-citation, I think the summary of distinctions from v6 to v7 to v8 here is pretty decent, and if you've grounded your expectations around personal experiences interacting with the system before 2020 or summaries from before 2018 you may be surprised.
There are a number of good (and pro-trans) doctors that are skeptical about surgical or hormonal interventions within the earlier limits of the new SOC, especially before puberty (and, from the other direction, I'm not convinced that 16-18 is that big of a deal), and there are a number of (sometimes unintuitive) serious flaws with the v6-era rules, but it's a lot harder to just point to the SOC and motion around them being uncontroversial.
gattsuru
4d ago
Even before that, any serious changes to the FDA's approval process would either trigger the APA, or be close enough that courts would have easy opportunity to be pulled in. And attempting to slowboat things by just crawling up vaccine production facility tailpipes with thick rubber gloves trying to find the slightest mistake runs into the problem where that's already the FDA's normal procedure.
gattsuru
5d ago
The US situation is kinda a clusterfuck.
Most vaccines fall under the NCVIA, so any claims of injury go to the NVICP, where the standard of proof is hilariously low. It's a little more strict than a 'damn that's an ugly baby' fund, but not by much, and the willingness of the program to accept sometimes implausible alleged links has been used as support for no small number of implausible further links. Funds are drawn from a vaccine excise tax, which in theory, and in practice is a mix of Medi*, insurance and private dollars.
COVID vaccines were specifically exempted by the PREP Act in a different way, falling under the CICP. Where NCVIA is extremely fail-positive, CICP is the reverse: requiring "compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence", and very happy to can claims over minor paperwork faults. As a result, the lack of any successful claims even into mid-2022 drove a lot of skepticism, and while they've since recognized some, the numbers remain implausibly low.
((There are some similar exceptions for smallpox vaccines and I think the military anthrax vaccine.))
I think it's more incompetence than malice, but the inability to find the Goldilocks zone badly undermines institutional trust.
gattsuru
5d ago
Might not be China, specifically, but yeah. International liability basically doesn’t exist even in the face of ruinously and maliciously bad behavior, local liability is absolutely crushing even in face of well-intentioned and innocent mistake, and the old solution of importers being responsible has collapsed in the face of big names outsourcing that to tiny and judgement proof third parties in the Amazon Marketplacificiation of internet sales.
gattsuru
5d ago
I enjoyed the original pretty happily during initial release (and played and enjoyed with caveats Clear Sky), though I never got too heavily into the modded sphere. There was always a bit of tension between the different gameplay components -- the full Roadside Picnic where impatience was your worst enemy, the horror bits of a bloodsucker popping up out of nowhere, and the 'puzzle' of 'use sniper on guy' outdoor warfare always ground a bit at the edges -- but it was pretty enjoyable for what it was.
Not sure if I'll get the sequel any time soon, but good to keep in mind.
gattsuru
6d ago
In addition to a Supreme Court decision overturning Obergfell, revoking federal recognition of gay marriage would also require either overturning in court or revoking at Congress the Respect for Marriage Act, with no credible extant theory for the former, and the latter dependent on either 60 Senators going against gay marriage or 50 Senators willing to nuke the filibuster over it. And neither the Trump admin or any of its affiliates ran against gay marriage, with even the often-nutty Project 2025 avoiding the topic entirely.
gattsuru
7d ago
Most of the opposition is going to point at her record on Syria -- she was ponderously slow to realize Assad was an asshole, and remained skeptical that he used chemical weapons after . She cites the Iraq War as cause, and that's fair to an extent, but it's an odd thing to bring to the DNI. I dunno whether to read it as a (figurative) bomb-thrower that'll root through some of the various agencies' more corrupt bits or at least throw some chaos into the various whisper campaigns, or just something she really wanted and Trump was willing to give her.
Some of that's just a tendency for conservative hawks to treat anyone remotely skeptical of their institutions as deadly poison, but even in the self-described neocon circles that wouldn't have cared about other spheres are really concerned on this one -- there was a minor news cycle when she mentioned demanding a ceasefire around Ukrainian that was mostly noteworthy for Romney calling it treason. Same from the places Democrats have been hawks. Which... may or may not be persuasive to you.
She shares a bit of crystal healer woo with RFK, though that probably matters less at here than any other cabinet position. She's also separately a social conservative on a lot of stuff (gays, trans people, abortion, DEI), though that's mostly a separate deal.
From the Blue Tribe-specific stuff, it's a little more boring: she pushed against Clinton getting the 2016 nomination, and hasn't treated Trump or January 6th as The Worst Thing Ever, and is not pro-LGBT.
gattsuru
7d ago
Gaetz is funny enough to be trolling, but more likely Trump just wants someone willing to be enough of a hatchetman. Be interesting to see how much of the confirmation fight circles around his actual philosophy, rather than around how oily he is (spoiler: yes) or the reputed and increasingly dubious allegations of the most sexual impropriety.
gattsuru
7d ago
Yeah, that's fair, especially the frustrations about the game itself not really existing. Having some level of self-imposed limits on guns and ship complexity can keep a server moderately performant even with bigger ships -- I have had several 2m-5m kg multi-ship combat scenarios that were reasonably playable physics-update wise -- but the lack of reason to do it is more serious for the game.
It's realistic that space doesn't really have a ton of choke points, but it has a very First Year No Man's Sky feel to it, without a lot of the charm that NMS had. Keen's put into a wide variety of game modes that just don't really exist in the vanilla game. Even with Contact finally adding a reason to actually use the combat system after literally ten years, it ends up resulting in a couple dozen randomly-placed encounters with nothing but GPS waypoints to push toward them. MEMS and similar mods show solutions to these things, and I can understand not wanting to be quite as overwhelmingly common as in those mods, but it's disappointing in many ways.
KSP is definitely more 'complete' as a game (and more realistic, as you mention on the orbital mechanics stuff), even if some of the mechanics in the non-sandbox mode are kinda dumb. In exchange, it's a good deal more limited on the construction side.
I remember merge blocks being fairly okayish. I used them for docking without issues.
They're a lot smarter than Connectors, but there's some hilarious stuff that happens if you have too many around, or if certain blocks are on the subgrid (eg, magplates, short wheel suspensions, rotors oh god rotors).
My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.
Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.
There's probably a steelman of that Allred piece -- heaven knows Lambda's collapse has a lot to be embarrassed about -- but it has such a scattered grab-bag of every disagreement possible that it's a little hard to take at face value. The clear illegality of operating as an unregistered school is damning, and then it's undercut by the 'oh and the legislature had to update the law later to make clear it was really-illegal not just I-want-it-to-be illegal'. Allred's homelessness was a lie, because he could have gone back to his parent's spare bedroom, as evidenced by this example of a guy who... was homeless until he made calls and went to a friend's spare bedroom. He did that incredibly dumb Sample Size of One Gimmick, but he also considers a court holding an arbitration clause intact as winning (spoiler: yes) and ran a pretty stupid 500 USD hustle to try to promote a YouTube channel (congrats, you've found an influencer). He's made three references to Elon Musk, which is tots a sign of delusion, and not just having different political aspirations, which is near-certainly what really set Sandusky off. There's some serious criticisms of Lamda excluding 'no-longer-searching' students that weren't searching because Lambda left them with no change or dropouts that Lamda went after for pennies, and also here's a claim of 27% job placement that's behind a paywall, which, once you roll the rock aside depends on interpretations of a leaked slide deck that, afaict, isn't anywhere online and allegedly is disputed by third-party auditors.
Which is probably is big difference. Graham's definitely got some serious faults here, and that he's not more critical where Lamda has fucked up says a lot about whether he's on the outside pissing in or the inside pissing out. But his sort of people have an answer about an indefensible fellow insider: they never mention them again. That's what you're seeing with Breslow -- Bolt faltered like most companies trying to upscale too fast in a highly competitive field (albeit with some hilarity when the pivot to profit collapsed, which isn't especially interesting, but that he dissed them and no one cares enough to accuse Breslow of eating faces means you couldn't get Graham et all to mention his name without a set of pliers.
Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed (and to be fair, I could be persuaded!), and at a more importantly, because so many criticisms of Allred were and are somewhere between exaggerated and junk.
gattsuru
8d ago
Yeah, I meant more in the sense that intersections of two grids (or more, or where subgridding) can be annoying to line up at best, and Clangtastic more often.
The PCU limits are really conservative, especially with modern computers. The defaults can be easily disabled and the hard limits are a lot more reasonable, but it’s definitely a thing I hope is much improved for the vrage3 version.
gattsuru
9d ago
To steelman:
- There's a Biden-era regulation holding EMTALA to cover abortion in emergency room case involving life or health of the mother, and under the supremacy clause, override states that ban abortion under those circumstances. A Trump administration is extremely likely to reduce this in scope to life or serious physical harm of the mother, if not rescind it wholesale.
- While surgical interventions are almost entirely regulated at the state level, drugs are near-completely dominated by federal law. The Biden-era FDA took an unusually expansive approach toward availability of prescription abortificants (and some contraceptives), allowing levels of telemedicine and other issuance that was previously not accepted. I don't think a Trump admin cares about OTC birth control pills, but I think it both at least attempts to claw back things like the reading that states may not ban a drug that the FDA has permitted or the guidance that refusing to fill a reproductive health prescription is a violation of civil rights law.
- The Comstock Act is still technically on the books, and while I don't think expansive interpretations focused on speech are likely to be used (and extremely unlikely to survive court scrutiny if used), there are a pretty wide variety of unenforced bits that would be highly sympathetic to bring to bear, and would make a lot of stuff that's illegal-but-you-can-do-it-anyway into hope you like federal prison if you attract the eye of sauron stuff.
- Medi* funding is an absolute clusterfuck: by law, it's not supposed to support it, excepting a few cases where the spending is instead mandatory, but cash is fungible and there's a lot of places that aren't exactly great about paperwork. That's historically been papered over (largely because then-unsettled Constitutional law was a third rail), but if the Trump DoJ drops the Haim indictment and starts aggressively auditing or courting whistleblowers, even short of actual enforcement it will likely reduce availability as hospitals check their six consistently.
- Direct defunding of groups like Planned Parenthood isn't possible without a law (and shouldn't be even with one, except the protections of the writs of attainder clause are pretty lackluster), but something like the ACORN path is possible, and there's questions about the extent regulation could create rules that had the same effect without needing a law. Even if new orgs grow in response, they will be disrupted in the meantime.
- There's a lot of politics that's about building terrain for latter politics. There's a paranoid conspiracy theory about Project 2025 wanting a registry of every woman's pregnancy, but the actual policy proposal is :
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion
And this is something that's not that objectionable, but it's also extremely likely to have a number of very unpleasant numbers reported by a government agency.
gattsuru
10d ago
... the language is "I want to flirt with your dad" and "I did your dad," both of which are like 5th-grade starter-pack level in the scale of "fucked your mom" jokes.
That, uh, says as much about what I'm willing to link (and what can be posted on youtube/twitch/yada) as much as it does about behaviors in certain social circles. I'll admit I haven't seen double-fisting specifically brought to offer, but neither does it stop at teabagging jokes.
While we're in this media sphere, another thing I've been genuinely curious about: what's the standard level of sexual violence theming in gay porn (of the sort actually made for gay men)?
I think aoiislove overstates the extent it shows up in all gay male sexuality, but it's definitely present, and pretty common. It's a little hard to calculate exactly, because there's a lot of stuff that's sexual violence to women and also has gay men lining up (sometimes literally) to receive. (and conversely, a few things that are more appalling to gay guys.)
Like, does popular gay porn do "dumb twink rammed until he CAN'T WALK STRAIGHT" or "Ten portly bears PUNISH this bratty man's BLEEDING ASSHOLE while he begs" style videos at the same rate as straight porn
Can't walk straight, definitely, along with a lot of similar stuff ('guts rearranged' is popular right now, 'wrecks hole' been along since before I knew I was bi, sometimes just 'dominates' or even just outright 'bullies'). Ten portly bears definitely, and while it's a little hard as a direct comparison because there's a lot of gay guys for whom that sounds like a great start to a Friday night, there's enough where it's not supposed to be attractive or appealing directly that is pretty comparable. Bleeding is a bit unusual: there's commercial restrictions for mainstream credit card sites that are more intended for actual knives-and-beatings BDSM edgeplay, but mainstream merchants still avoid it. The closest common gay male porn term would probably be some variant of 'gape'.
and are there similar levels of theming about men getting choked and hit,
Yeah. Not my thing, but slapping, choking (with hands or dick), hitting, spitting, markings, comically oversized sex toys, (usually fake) 'insufficient lube', that sort of rough sex has enough of a following you have to put some effort on mainstream sites to avoid it.
... getting stuck in tight places and begging for help, having guys cum on their face and chest...
These ones are hard to compare directly. The latter in particular is extremely common ('painting', straight-up bukkake), but it's... probably not something most people think about as sexual violence?
I'll point to Braeburned's Room 609 (llama guy puts himself in a hole in a door, gets eiffel tower'd by his roommate and whoever his roommate taps on an app to take the other side) comic as an example of the problem: it's easy to frame what's effectively a gay-male-variant of the 'free use' fantasy that in its het form is very much built around ignoring women's consent and physical integrity... but Braeburned and quite a large portion of the fans of the series are preferentially bottoms, and even in his other comics that have a guy getting a surprise train run on them (eg Gay For Play, where the main character gets roped into a football team prank that ends up... where you'd expect) can credibly make it seem consenting because it's pretty clear the author would love it. That's a furry example, but there are non-furry and conventional-porn ones, just harder to track down names and personalities involved.
That's not to say clearly eroticized sexual violence using these themes is unusual -- I'll point to NakedSav's "Marked Prey" as one that's very much presented from an mdom rather than msub perspective, and the msub side is about as degrading as the author's willing to go. It definitely shows up as a thing in certain types of gay-for-pay or masc4masc genre 'normal' porn. But it may not be useful as a metric, compared to other traits in the work.
Stuck in tight places is kinda a goofy 'plot', even by porn plot standards, and thus pretty rare, but it definitely shows up, including the begging (or at least pretense of it for a couple seconds). There's a mostly-gay-specific thing about (ruiadri just posted a great one today!) about making a sub paint themselves, but I dunno what the comparable het thing would be outside of pegging/pretty heavy femdom.
[cw: all links involve pretty crude jokes with audio]
Do locker-room lads generally respond with twinkling eyes...
I don't think it's universal, but there's absolutely some spaces where variants of gay chicken that get that direction. It's... actually kinda awkward in mixed-orientation environments, especially where not everyone knows each other's orientation is common knowledge (conversation starts at 20:00, relevant bit continuing to 21:30).
Just in the last two weeks, I've had a male co-volunteer at an IRL project I've helped with set up,and continue a joke where the punchline involved him asking me to punch his v-card, and me responding 'I'd have to buy you dinner after', and him laughing at it. I'm pretty sure he's straight? But it's an education-focused IRL project, so it's not like I'm out, there, anyway.
((That said, even those spaces require pretty specific levels of familiarity and have other specific taboos; Fuentes, here, is just being an ass.))
A sincere question: if sexual-assault jokes are an essential and universal part of male bonding, do gay dudes joke about raping each other's dads?
Uh... at least for 'fucked your mom' level jokes, absolutely positively yes.
But I wouldn't be surprised to see something relatively weak, third trimester with rape/incest exceptions or something. With a decent Republican lead in the Senate and probably a small lead in the house, there's at least a chance.
I can't see Democratic senators skipping the filibuster on an abortion ban, Republicans not having three or four Senators flake if the rest of the Republicans try to nuke the filibuster over it, and then there's the lawsuits. The 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban had a third of the Dem Senate cross over to get passed, as a comparison.
That said, I think there are stronger examples. At the regulatory level, I'd expect to see the EMTALA abortion rule nixed, either by the Trump admin removing the rule and/or refusing to support it, and there's a variety of funding levers that can get tweaked (at least until the APA challenge) even if 'officially' no Medicaid money was supposed to have gone to abortion. There's likely to be a lot changed on trans matters, whether through judicial avenues (Skrmetti's getting heard in December, but there's a number of follow-up cases slotted in) or regulatory ones (compare the Dear Colleague letter volleyball). College debt delays and forgiveness might not have survived judicial review moving forward, but they're definitely not going to survive a Trump admin.
And there's a lot of stuff on this sorta path in a variety of spheres. Some of them are unlikely for structural reasons -- a lot of people have tried to pull Project 2025's radfem porn opposition as likely to result in active prosecutions or financial chicanery that the Trump admin just won't be able to pull the DoJ or CFPB into focusing on -- but most of them much more plausible. Sometimes just because the Biden admin made such hilariously aggressive rules, and these people are upset that they're going to lose the benefits of them. But that's still a thing with impact.
gattsuru
12d ago
They’ve since added an optional (hold Control) ‘world grid’ to Satisfactory, which helps a lot with alignment. But it definitely does get overwhelming still, and not a problem specific to just this game: Manufactio and Space Engineers struggle a lot because of it.
gattsuru
12d ago
I'd recommend it even if renting: bathroom fans in particular are pretty prone to get clogged with random junk. And even without a fire, the reduced airflow from lint can be enough to promote mold in bathrooms if you take showers often. Landlord should take care of it between renters, but there's a lot of space between should and did.
Even hand-cleaning with a wire-brush-on-a-stick is pretty effective. Just be sure to hit the inlet at the drier, the outlet where it exhausts, and then run an empty no-heat cycle on the drier for a couple minutes -- a lot of people clean out the side nearest the drier heavily, and then get surprised that the outlet gets clogged.
gattsuru
12d ago
I'd be pretty surprised. There are gay frats, and not just in the explicitly LGBTQWTFBBQ sense, but SAE neither advertises itself nor has a reputation along those lines, at least from what I can see as someone not hugely familiar with frat life. And Salisbury is a pretty tiny school to start with; the statistics would only give around 50-100ish gay (or bisexual) men across campus in total.
gattsuru
12d ago
NBC News has reached out to attorneys for Aird and Leinemann. The others had no attorney information listed. All of the students were released this week on recognizance bonds, except Pietuszka who has his bond hearing Friday.
The Baltimore Banner:
Attorney James L. Britt said the alleged victim is a man in his 40s who propositioned what he thought was a 16-year-old. “Once all of the facts see the light of day, this case will be shown to be an ill-advised attempt to expose someone willing to travel to have sexual relations with a 16-year-old child,” he wrote in an email.
I don't particularly trust any news media or defense attorneys (and their clients), and even if they were being honest there's a lot of ways for people to have tried to portray their character as 16 and failed, but if true, it's not sounding like a Romeo and Romeo sorta situation. And given SAE's reputation, I expect their students would not be especially unfamiliar with the local laws regarding age of consent.
gattsuru
14d ago
Washington State has another 1.3m, Oregon and Colorado 0.6m, Arizona 1.2m, Maryland and Illinois and Utah 0.5m. I think Trump still (somehow!) wins the popular vote if the late ballots follow state-wide trends, and even if they're pretty blue, it's still either a win or so close as to be a tie. It's just not likely that total turnout is that much lower than the 2020 election as today's highlights suggest.
gattsuru
14d ago
At least if I'm reading things correctly, that's 10M currently counted, for a total of around 17.25m ballots cast, and 7.25m remaining uncounted. 58% of that would be ~4.1m, but between county breakdowns and mail-ins breaking more toward Dem in general I'd guess 5m is a lot more reasonable minimum, giving a 12.5-6.5m split in the final vote count for the state. That'd be pretty comparable in final result to the 2020 11m-6m.
Fun part 1:
There's some !!fun!! questions about how accurate the claims were, but because this was at the motion to dismiss phase, the court is supposed to accept even remotely plausible claims from the non-moving party.
Fun part 2: This wasn't 2020. That example was February 2019, aka pre-Floyd.
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