jkf
14hr ago
I know that Trump's been saying this, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly wrong -- mainly because it's approximately as hard to get precursors into Canada as it is to get them directly into the US; also while we do have our own homegrown gangs their capacity is pretty limited compared to the cartel scene in Mexico.
You are certainly wrong about the real estate <-> drug money pipeline; this is rare enough to be negligible (mom & pop stuff) -- the main laundering going on (in the western part of the country anyways) is people trying to hide money from the Chinese government. Maybe you have real estate confused with casinos?
jkf
14hr ago
It's not abrasive -- depending on the nature of the veneer I bet it would work fine. Very little material is removed per pass, but once you get under a layer of finish it comes off like magic. I've mostly been using mine to get the 70s varnish off some gun stocks; you need to sand a little in the crannies in that case, but with a table it should be very little.
You can get expensive ones at Lee Valley and such that I'm sure are better steel, but I bought something like these guys, and it's fine:
https://www.amazon.com/HERMIT-TOOLS-Burnisher-Multi-Shaped-Rectangle/dp/B0CJRW4C66/
(More like 20 bucks I guess; inflation, amirite?)
jkf
18hr ago
For a flat/regular-ish surface like a table, you'd be frikken amazed how fast a steel cabinet scraper will definish -- you can get a pack of them for like ten bucks on Amazon and never have to deal with goo or environmentalists again.
jkf
1d ago
eh, it's got it's charms -- every time it's different, it's a little puzzle you need to figure out. (without breaking your legs)
jkf
1d ago
You'd need to watch the film (or read the book) to get it -- it's sort of a joke that can't be a joke, or else it's not funny.
People who grew up skiing in the East are often really good -- at going fast on bulletproof ice. This is kind of a niche talent though -- something like being awesome at plucking your own nose-hairs. Maybe you can find somebody else to go to some Western mountain with?
jkf
1d ago
Would you take $100k/a now and everything stays as normal, or $1M/a (now) and you can never touch a smartphone again? Nor have a poke-bowl of any kind.
jkf
1d ago
That... wasn't the question? I thought the scenario was $100k now vs $100k (which is like a million-ish now) in 1959 -- I make somewhat more than that already and it's pretty great, but if everybody else in my life were also transported back to 1959 I would swap at current salary without hesitation. Poke bowls? Come on man.
jkf
1d ago
It's, uh -- mostly a joke:
https://archive.org/details/the-unofficial-game-of-g-n-a-r
(not sure whether your guy is joking -- you should go skiing with him and find out!)
jkf
1d ago
and unironically claims that whenever he skis in the East he's invariably the best person at the resort.
If you say it ironically, you don't get any gnar points -- does he also bang his poles together and scream "I'm going to rip the shit out of this" at the top of the run?
jkf
2d ago
being the chieftain of a hunter-gatherer tribe, or an ancient Assyrian king, would be preferable to living in the modern age
Being a hunter-gatherer of any rank would probably kind of suck, because being a hunter-gatherer sucks -- but being an Assyrian king sounds kind of fucking awesome? I guess you'd want to be a successful king so you and your family don't get wiped out in a war, but the day-to-day would have to be pretty great, no?
jkf
2d ago
You seem to have confused "safe and sensible" with "awesome" -- they are not the same thing at all!
As discussed last week in fact, life is quite a bit more awesome if you don't try to optimize everything for lowest possible risk -- including (maybe especially) around vehicular decisionmaking.
jkf
3d ago
As usual, he's "not even wrong" -- a 1959 Cadillac totally had leather seats, and cost like $10k -- if you made 100k/a, you could buy one for cash. (and it would be fucking awesome-even now a like-new 1959 Cadillac is much more awesome than a new Mercedes or something!)
You would not live in Wisconsin -- you might have a hunting lodge there or something though. But if for some reason your hirelings failed to keep the car clean and it got rusty, you would buy another one! In fact you would probably get a new one on more like a yearly basis, because your company would be providing it for free.
You would certainly not be ordering in and watching Lucy -- you would be going out and having fun smoking, drinking and fucking your secretary. (see Mad Men)
If Zoomers would rather have Candy Crush and a poke bowl, it says more about them than about the 1950s.
jkf
6d ago
Lotus was definitely the market pioneer, but they failed to effectively move the product forward and were looking quite obsolete by the late 80s or so as I recall -- Excel changed the game about like Lotus had done ten years before, and they were adding useful functionality that was unavailable elsewhere until... probably the early 2000s? Office 2K was pretty good as I recall, and didn't really significantly improve again until maybe 2012 -- which falls into the hopefully looking period that I'm proposing quite nicely.
Now of course they are just bungling around trying to replace vba with Javascript for some reason -- was somebody challenged to implement a worse scripting language than vba, or is it that Indians really like Javascripting All The Things? Big questions...
jkf
6d ago
Nothing. Microsoft products have always been that way.
Come on man -- MS products (other than their OS I suppose) were cutting edge in the 80s/90s and dominated the ecosystem for good reasons. There was also a brief period in and around when they started rolling out the Win10 preview versions (2010-ish?) where it seemed like they were genuinely making progress in dealing with the technical debt and adding interesting functionality; not sure how well the decline since then tracks with I.I., but the correlation does seem to exist.
jkf
6d ago
Brittania and Gaul?
Also the North American Indians were already on the technological frontier so far as "living in North America" was concerned when the Euros showed up, and remained so for about a few hundred years -- they were behind in the "conquering and killing people" department though, which turned out to be pretty important.
jkf
7d ago
Companies that are structured as distinct and separate branches with no overall leader would be... quite unusual. I can't think of any, and if I could I would think it would be extremely unusual for a minor minion of one of the branches to be able to overrule the leader of a different "coequal" one. (and @pusher_robot, I'm pretty sure the DoJ already has their own HR?)
jkf
7d ago
Imagine if you got an email from your company saying that your boss was no longer employed there
Getting an email from some judge saying that your boss is no longer employed at your company would be quite unusual though; "your company" in this case is the executive branch (c'est Trump!), no?
jkf
7d ago
If you already own nothing and work for your (shady) dad, the available punishments are quite limited though.
jkf
9d ago
also massive budget problems in every place that relies on property tax income.
This part is 100% not true -- if your home price goes down so will your property taxes, but if everyone's home price goes down, the taxes will stay the same. Your town has a budget -- it determines the tax bill per dollar value, not the other way around.
jkf
10d ago
If this OP (and the bulk of OP's followup comments) are less than 40% AI, I'll eat my hat -- it's plausibly 100% autobot stuff, although "cut & paste with minor tweaks" would be my modal prediction.
In any case, if the rule is "more than x% AI content, but 'x' is measured by 'trust me bro', there might as well be no rule at all. Which is why 'zero, but if your LLM process is such that it's indistinguishable from zero, nobody is looking over your shoulder so whatever' is the only feasible decision matrix.
The problem being that the koolaid crowd seems unaware that obvious LLM output is obvious, and will probably get pissy -- c'est la vie, I say.
jkf
10d ago
This is the "just build your own financial system if you want to [political act]" finally deployed against the outgroup.
Particularly juicy in that the nations of the EU, uh -- did in fact have their own financial systems previously...
jkf
11d ago
Tres drole -- what actually is the exact rule about AI posting? I forget, but I thought it was theoretically not allowed on grounds of low effort. (other than the "but I was just using it to help me edit" excuse/loophole, which is clearly not true with this guy -- have you been reading his replies?)
Try it on a scrap of anything with old paint and you'll see what I mean -- it's not like a normal paint scraper, there's a burr on the edge so you hold it almost 90 degrees to the work and pull towards you with both hands. It does make shavings, but very very thin ones -- less than a thousandth of an inch I'd say? Much thinner that what you see in those Japanese planing contests, and easy to control by how hard you bear down.
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