wraelk
1d ago
This is wild to me: I'd say "yes sir" to the garbageman, assuming he was asking me a question where it made sense and being reasonably polite to me.
Or to someone I've actually hired to do a job for me, I'm pretty sure I actually have used it with the pest control people.
I'd use it for basically any interaction in a professional setting: if someone's working a job they deserve at least that much respect, assuming they're not being rude or disrespectful to me. I'd honestly expect both of us to be using that terminology back and forth.
wraelk
1d ago
But this is broadly what we would expect, in a world where ICE anonymizes themselves: when people want to attack ICE, they need to do it while they're on their official duties, because they don't know which people at home are ICE agents. Attacks that are prevented by anonymizing ICE don't happen, because ICE anonymized and thus the attacks were prevented.
We can't examine the counterfactual world where attacking ICE agents at home is easier, since we're not living in it. Conceivably some of these attacks could have been replaced by attacking agents at home, if it were easier to do so.
wraelk
11d ago
There exist people who make that much, but it doesn't scale: a random person can't suddenly decide "I'm going to be a culture warrior" and reliably earn a six-figure salary from that career decision. For every person that does, there will be dozens who languish in obscurity and make no money.
wraelk
1mo ago
Wouldn't keeping editing but removing deletion be pointless? You could just edit your post, change it to the text "[deleted]" and get effectively the same result as deleting it.
wraelk
1mo ago
About 70% of our effort-posts, if posted on Reddit, would immediately face accusations of being AI. Even things written in, say, 2020.
I actually had this happen to me!
I made a detailed comment about a particular video game strategy in the game's subreddit, probably around 2020, long before writing it with AI would have been plausible.
This year someone responded with "if this wasn't written when it was I would think it was AI"
I guess given the context that's a compliment?
The entire religion is predicated on the Messiah returning and the Temple being rebuilt on these grounds.
Would the Messiah not just remove the fallout? If anything, it'd be a pretty good indicator that it was time to rebuild, plus now there's no existing competition for the site.
And radiation actually maps pretty well to existing divine wrath, specifically the Ark of the Covenant curses from 1 Samuel.
But after they had brought it to Gath, the hand of the Lord was against the city, causing a very great panic; he struck the inhabitants of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them.
... For there was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. The hand of God was very heavy there; those who did not die were stricken with tumors, and the cry of the city went up to heaven.
One could argue that the framers meant the small arms of the 1780s -- which were the only guns they knew about, and if a city-destroying laser gun had popped up in 1800 they might have felt different about everyone owning it.
The easy test case here is cannons: they were well-known in the 1780s, they're clearly not useful for personal defense since they're tremendously unwieldy and are only really militarily effective in a standing battle, and they've got the potential for mass casualties loaded with grapeshot or other shrapnel, or property destruction loaded with explosive shells.
So, were cannons privately owned at the time of the Constitution's writing? Did the Founding Fathers take legal steps to ban personal ownership of cannons? Doing some scanning, my tentative conclusion is that they were fine with cannons, I certainly can't find any landmark case saying "well rifles are fine, but cannons are too far". People mention private cannon manufacturers, privateers, and private artillery companies, although I will note that a lot of this seems to come out in response to Biden saying "you couldn't own a cannon during the Revolutionary War" during a speech, so it has become a culture war thing. And the Massachusetts militia gathering cannon at Concord was the kickoff of the Revolutionary War.
Rifled cannons are currently banned, but that seems to be part of the NFA in 1934, well past Founding Father influence, and smoothbore cannons appear to still be legal.
wraelk
3mo ago
RFK Jr. sounds like a corpse.
You said JFK. Barring some new information, he is a corpse.
wraelk
4mo ago
But people go to the hospital for a different set of problems than they're fed chicken soup by their mothers, as evidenced by the fact that children with mothers still end up in the hospital at times.
With childcare it does seem like we're looking for simple skills: I'm sure some people would want nannies that are teaching their kids algebra, but there's clearly a demand for "keep them fed and clean and away from electrical sockets" level of childcare.
The bigger issue is I think trust: the actual tasks are simple but having someone reliable enough to do them every time, not cut corners, and not take opportunities to enrich themselves with access to the family home is a little more difficult when we're trying to bring costs down.
wraelk
4mo ago
if at any point he had stated he was opposed to gay marriage
This actually happened though: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-still-opposes-same-sex-marriage/
Did his base turn on him in an instant? It seems like they reelected him instead.
wraelk
6mo ago
Yeah, but at least the TIEs have a reasonable case for skipping the hyperdrive: they're designed to be cheap and fast (which is why they don't have shields either), and they're always operating from a planetary base or capital ship because the Empire intends to have those everywhere it's going to be conducting operations.
Why the Jedi Starfighter doesn't have one (or rather, why they chose a non-hyperdrive-equipped fighter for the Jedi) is a mystery though: the Jedi typically go in very small numbers to out-of-the-way locations, and seem to have a pretty sizable budget. Agility and speed is clearly a benefit with Jedi precognition, but... what happens if your foe destroys your hyperdrive ring and now you're stuck in a middle-of-nowhere system? The answer's clearly "carve your way through the enemy base, steal their ship, and leave", but it's hard to imagine that you want that to be the plan.
wraelk
6mo ago
The Empire or Republic only really seem to have symbolic control. They stick up a flag, but other than that, I don’t think they actually control much beyond the core worlds.
I don't know how much made this into Disney canon, but in Legends a lot of power was held by regional governors, the Moffs. Someone out far from the Core wouldn't necessarily know much about the Emperor, but there was a local Imperial force with a Star Destroyer or two and plenty of stormtroopers that would be their local taste of the Empire and generally had pretty strong control (albeit with a lot of corruption).
Tatooine just wasn't a planet the local Moff cared about at all, which is why Jabba had his palace in the awful desert planet instead of a paradise planet like Naboo or even one that was kind of similar to Nal Hutta.
wraelk
6mo ago
Huh, you're right, Jedi Starfighters are like half the area of an A-wing. That's wild, previously I would have said they were one of the larger starfighters in the series. Something about how the art and/or game cameras always show them up close, I guess?
Actually, something's off. Slave 1 is 21.5m x 21.3m x 7.8m= 3,572.01 m^3, a Jedi Starfighter is 8m x 3.92m x 1.44m= 45.1584 m^3. Now go look at the asteroid battle scene from Attack of the Clones: does the Slave 1 look nearly 80 times as big as the Jedi Starfighter?
Back to the broader point, I think this is inconsistent with Maiq's hypothesis: new military-grade hardware is coming out throughout the series and is apparently available enough that the Rebels can get their hands on it. We don't see the Rebels having to make do with Clone Wars tech (and even that would only be ~20 years old, the equivalent of someone using a F-22 Raptor from 2005 today): they're using some old fighters but also have fresh from the factory equipment regularly. And since the Rebels probably don't have special contracts with the military companies that are also selling to the Empire, that suggests that all you need to get a fresh-off-the-line ship is credits.
It does seem to support pusher_robot's hypothesis that they're having trouble making truly large jumps technologically: the new stuff and the old stuff are roughly equivalent in power level, it's just about optimizing how the same tools are used. That's how you end up with weird things like the B-Wing.
wraelk
6mo ago
Most of the starfighters used by the rebels are relatively new: the B-Wing first saw combat 4 years before the Battle of Yavin, the X-Wing appears to have been less than 10 years old at that point as well, although there's no clear answer on when it was developed. Apparently originally pitched to the Imperials rather than the Republic though, so that's a cap on how old it can be.
It does seem like they have trouble making paradigm-shifting advances though: the Y-Wing is Clone Wars era and while it has problems, it's perfectly capable of performing on the same level as more modern fighters, it's not like we saw anyone complaining about getting assigned a Y-Wing instead of an X-Wing for the Death Star run.
Some weird regressions too: I initially thought Obi-Wan's hyperdrive ring in Attack of the Clones was something that got improved upon for the Imperial era, but the N-1 starfighters in Phantom Menace had integrated hyperdrives, so that was just a deliberate design choice.
How close to done is this? I'm seeing epilogues in the latest chapters, so I'm hoping it's finishing up?
I've got a few web serials on my plate and the thing I've learned most is that it sucks to hit the wall of "most recent update" or worse "last updated 3 years ago", and I've realized I'm way happier if I just let them finish or not-finish the story before I commit my time.
I should look into... someone in the SSC diaspora had a cool story about "what if the person who became Superman was just kind of awful but took over the world anyway", I really enjoyed that but then hit the "most recent update" wall. It has to have been a few years at this point, maybe they're done. It's a shame I forgot the name.
wraelk
6mo ago
They wouldn't have to be on the list themselves, they'd just need to have enough friends and supporters on the list that it wasn't worth throwing them all under a bus to maybe get a solid hit in on Trump.
wraelk
6mo ago
I think this is more about the incredibly nice interactive UI than gatekeeping the actual knowledge of how to tie a knot.
I have no problem searching whatever arbitrary thing I want on my phone, or indeed typing paragraphs of text: if all this app did was present pretty text instructions I'd have no interest, it's easy to get those text instructions to my phone any time I want for free. But I want to learn knot-tying and don't really understand it, and this seems like a significant improvement for learning.
If you think that sort of thing is easy to code through AI, you're welcome to throw an open-source and free version of it up somewhere, you'd be helping out rope enthusiasts everywhere and making a convincing case that the developers aren't doing anything important. I suspect the easy-to-code version of that app loses a lot in usability though.
wraelk
6mo ago
The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment.
But it's not like putting those in the upper track would have actually helped there, higher-tier classes are if anything more restrictive. And it certainly wouldn't have helped the other kids in that track having their education disrupted.
Maybe this suggests the "bottom track" should be significantly shorter or more freeform: get the basics down, then either let the kids out of schooling early or let them spend that time in more focused programs. The writers decide they like writing and then get to spend their whole day on writing instead of learning chemistry. This seems like it might help mitigate the impression that being pushed into a lower track is a permanent blight on kids' lives, that they're being condemned to a label of "stupid".
Granted, they might later learn they're not all that great writers and regret wasting their time focusing so heavily on it, but they're unlikely to pivot into the chemistry or pre-calc classes they're missing in the upper tracks.
I guess the downside is that this style might be attractive enough to pull kids from the upper tracks, but at the very least it would be an unknown that might negatively impact college admissions, so the default path-to-career-success looks basically the same.
wraelk
6mo ago
This might run into some issues: Islam has exceptions for doing forbidden things in times of necessity, so you'd just be selecting for anyone who is non-Muslim or is Muslim but believes strongly enough that coming to America is vitally important. There's probably some heavy overlap with "would pretend to be a different religion" in the first place.
wraelk
6mo ago
The question is whether you're training a Smithing (exceedingly powerful applications to combat) or a Lockpicking (slight improvements to things you could already do just fine).
wraelk
6mo ago
I think the payoff is that it slightly expands the options of the Ukrainian public (that is, the portion of the country that would get to vote in the election).
They could conceivably be against the war and vote out Zelensky, an option which they don't really currently have: the press is censored and the country is under martial law, speaking out publicly to overturn Zelensky is probably pretty dangerous.
If they just vote Zelensky back in with overwhelming approval, then things end up exactly as they are with elections suspended, but we at least have the information that their heart is still in the fight, that they had the opportunity to back down in a secret ballot and chose not to take it.
Of course, this is dependent on the elections being conducted fairly, which may not be the case. But if Zelensky holds an election and rigs it/intimidates voters/whatever, that would just put him in the same position he is right now, but with the added risk of information on his actions leaking out.
If Trump managed to get himself paid $1 billion from the federal government somehow, I'm reasonably confident people wouldn't just ignore it, despite that being less than 1% of any of the numbers we're talking about.
wraelk
7mo ago
I think the "annexing canada" and the "tariff canada unless they accede to his demands" might be coming from the same place: "you're entirely dependent on the US, so get in line and work to our benefit, rather than benefiting from our largesse and then stabbing us in the back in every public forum you get into"
I think there are some other similar things in Trump's policies, like asking NATO to pay for its own defense: some of that is just cost-cutting, but some of it is the NATO countries deriding the US for being a warmonger while being completely dependent on its warfighting capability. I suspect if they were praising their benevolent protector instead of claiming they're superior because they don't need to spend money on weapons, it would be a lower priority.
Yeah, that's a fair point: there might be some difficulty finding people from nothing, but I absolutely believe motivated extremely-online people could compile a list of ICE agents who were willing to state it on Linkedin.
Trivial inconveniences might matter there, but it's clearly something that's doable.
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