domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
NewCharlesInCharge
1m ago
The judge did plenty, though granted him a whole lot of leeway. Eventually he ended up having to attend the trial from a separate room via videoconference so that he could be muted when he wouldn't behave.
This was a fun watch. The guy was a Soverign Citizen, and a small corner of Reddit went nuts with it. "Estoppel" became a catchphrase. I just checked and it's actually still quite active: https://old.reddit.com/r/DarrellBrooksJr/
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4m ago
Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.
As a ramming weapon, yes. But there was a spate of using them in bombings in the '90s. The 1993 WTC bombing and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing both used Ryder rental trucks. But I suppose that just proves your point that people crazy enough to commit mass homicide are rather derivative in terms of their methods.
Rov_Scam
13m ago
Lol, Uber has been offering this for years.
Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.
It's common in law, too, and you can also order food if you're working late. I worked in an office on the North Side from 2015 to 2017, when we moved into new digs in the Strip District. The move roughly coincided with Uber Eats launching in Pittsburgh and us switching over to them for our "late night perks". To be clear, the late-night car service is aimed toward people who rely on transit to get to work and is only offered by companies that don't offer parking passes. the rationale was that after 8 pm, transit switched from operating every 15 minutes to operating every hour, and since we were on the North Side you'd have to either walk across the bridge to Downtown or take 2 buses unless you happened to be on your route already, and doubling the wait times made that impracticable. I lived in the exurbs at the time and almost always drove in anyway, so I never used it.
Anyway, prior to the move the firm used a black car service which was better than Uber but a bit intimidating for normal people. A guy a worked with who used it once was kind of freaked out when a guy showed up in a Lincoln and opened the door for him. The reason why we switched was that the process, for both that and ordering food after 7 pm, used to be cumbersome. You had to use the company credit card and get receipts, and then fill out an expense report and submit it to HR. Then, just to make things perverse, HR would come back to me with another form I had to sign to demonstrate that the expense had been approved by an attorney (even though I already signed the expense report). The HR lady was thrilled about the switch because we could just order everything through the company account which would put the appropriate restrictions on time, location, price, etc., and then not worry about the forms. Then like 6 months later they started charging an additional 10% on business accounts and she was mildly pissed. I still had to deal with a ton of other credit card approvals, petty cash forms, reimbursement forms, mileage logs, and other bullshit that I (and everyone else) waited to do until the last minute to the long-suffering HR lady's eternal consternation. Good times.
In any event, I haven't heard of anyone using Uber for Business other than for occasional transportation like when traveling out of town or something like that. I don't see it ever becoming an everyday perk for anyone, let alone common enough to have any significant impact on traffic. Perks are usually commensurate with the level of responsibility and the nature of the work involved. Lots of people work late, but most of them can't bill food to the company because the added value doesn't justify it. When the extra 3 hours you spend at work clearly nets the company an additional thousand dollars, 20 bucks worth of takeout isn't an issue. Company cars are usually reserved for people in sales or other jobs that require you to be on the road all day, and even then they have to pay taxes on them based on personal use. One firm I worked at gave the attorneys parking passes but admins had to take the bus. This is because they expected the attorneys to work late hours regularly enough that paying for a spot was cheaper than paying for a car service. Admins never worked late. I switched jobs specifically because I hated being stuck at work late enough to be able to watch night games at PNC from my office window.
ArmedTooHeavily
15m ago
The one time I asked a doctor, he told me that donating a pint of blood cost closer to 2000 calories for your body to replace.
ArmedTooHeavily
18m ago
More or less 100% of people who refer to it as "the JQ" are using it as you describe.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23m ago
I found this blog when I was trying to figure out what a “Soviet triangle” meant. Thought it was interesting reading. That article is about bus networks, but there are others on subway placement, throughout, all sorts of stuff.
congestion fees
Those certainly disincentivize traffic, but I’m not sure I grasp the economics. Taxing consumption reduces the clearing quantity. But the clearing quantity for roads is the supply of workers! Any intervention that doesn’t change the ratio of road usage per worker is going to affect the cost of labor, too.
So we need to ask whether self-driving cars fundamentally changes that ratio. I think it has to, right? Flawless zipper-merging. Reduced accident rates. Shorter following distances, perhaps ending in attached convoys to reduce drag. There’s a lot of room for technical solutions.
I don’t think we’ve hit the limit on people-miles per hour. Until we do, we still have room to make congestion more efficient.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
27m ago
Redot
I'm happy to hear it. If they can make it so that compiling for double-precision AND C# actually works, then they're winners in my book. I'll check it out once I've established a new weekly routine that makes some suitable time for sitting down and tinkering.
@Southkraut, you mentioned you probably wouldn't have time over the past week, but I'll traditionally ask how are you doing anyway.
Thanks for asking, and please do keep it up, even though it's a bit of a drought right now. I did not get around to anything at all - I was always at work, or making up for my absence by going full hog on dad duty, or just plain tuckered out.
Can you elaborate on this. I think I know what you mean, but I don't know what consequences, if any, it would have on picking an Engine, for example.
It wouldn't. It's not related to the engine question. It's rather a change in how I approach my cluster of projects, and a change that snuck up on me and I only recognized it long after it happened. Let me illustrate the comparison a little.
Old: There are many Physical Entities. All these entities have complex physical properties and interactions. All these entities are always rendered and physically simulated. Some of those entities may contain so-called Functional Structures. Some of those Functional Structures might support Behaviors. Some of those might be Agents, who actually act upon the game world. All their actions and interactions go through the physical properties of their Physical Entities.
New: There are many agents. All these agents have goals and sets of possible actions. Some of those agents have physical bodies. But the actions and interactions of the agents only account for their physical bodies in the broadest sense, i.e., usually just location. Those physical bodies that are very close to the player's location are actually rendered and physically simulated, but the abstract behavior of the agents has priority over the physics simulation, and they can interact with non-rendered, non-physically-simulated agents just fine.
Also, congrats on the new job! I recall you posted about being burned out with the old one a while back. I've been in a similar position not long ago, so I'm glad to hear you took matters into your own hands, and hope the new job is a better fit.
I didn't really take the initiative on this until the last job really started falling apart, but it's still a sound improvement overall. Better salary, conditions, benefits, location, and most importantly I get along with my new colleagues very well, which was sadly not really the case in the old job. That last point is very important to me; I'm much more motivated when people I actually like depend on me. I'm also on premises all the time, which helps a lot with actually focusing on the job - no more distractions on the home front. The work itself is extremely dry and technically uninteresting, but I suppose you can't have it all. I'm honestly surprising myself with how easily I manage to adapt to the new working conditions after four years of practically pure home office, and how much energy I can muster for work after so much time spent just dragging myself along in a job I hated. It's nice. Exhausing, too, but I'm happier than I've been in a long time.
How did your similar situation turn out?
MathWizard
Good things are good
27m ago
I am absolutely not blue tribe, and never have been, this does not describe me. I grew up with Christian Republican parents, got a hunting license at 12 years old, I hate cities, am highly skeptical of big government and redistributive policies, and think the majority of social problems are best solved by self control and personal responsibility, or failing that, ruthless law enforcement. My grandparents on both sides are rednecks and they are wonderful and kind people who I adore. But I personally would rather spend my day on my computer than outdoors on a pickup truck, and I think the Republicans are equally braindead as the Democrats, just less trigger-happy about their stupid plans. I suppose you could define me as "a particular disaffected part of the red tribe", but then you have to explain why I have more in common with the other blue-grey people than I do with the pure red people. I think lots of the right-leaning Mottizens have similar cultural leanings. Some of them are disaffected blue tribe, but others came from Red. But most of us don't fit in nicely with either.
Even if you don't think "gray tribe" is the best way to describe it, there's clearly some real thing that the term is pointing to, something that bridges the gap between Red and Blue.
roystgnr
34m ago
No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it.
Tom Clancy, "Debt of Honor", wasn't too far off. Disgruntled pilot rather than hijackers, one plane into the Capitol building rather than 4 planes into assorted targets, but it obviously conveyed "a jumbo jet full of fuel is a dangerous missile", and it was the 7th book in a best-selling series that had already been adapted into 3 blockbuster movies.
Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack.
It was the weapon delivery system in the OKC bombing, but yeah, not the weapon.
as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.
I've always half-wondered why truck attacks didn't become a more serious threat. It seemed so trivially easy and moderately effective that in the wake of Nice I expected it to become just another Thing that happens regularly. Wikipedia doesn't even list more than a handful of copycats.
it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
IIRC this still holds even if you have a very loose definition of "terrorist"; the "contagious" timing of school shootings suggests that the kinds of assholes who try to become infamous for shooting up a school are much more likely to do so if there's been another famous school shooting recently, as if even though the idea is hardly a secret at this point they don't really take it seriously until they see a de-facto commercial for another one on the news.
I do also think there might be something to the theory
Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
The black trench coats and guns at Columbine were like an evil echo of The Matrix protagonists superhumanly fighting The Man, whereas simply running people over feels like something that could be accomplished by an elderly person confusing the gas and brake pedals. They say that "nobody thinks they're the villain of their own story", but also nobody even wants to think they're just a half-competent mook in their own story, so perhaps when they do slip into villainy they try to make it dramatic. The sort of utilitarian who deduces that you can massacre more people with a car than a gun might also generally be the sort who deduces that massacring a bunch of people doesn't actually accomplish any of your real goals anyway.
haroldbkny
37m ago
a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck
"The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with a complete lack of style?"
some
42m ago
The article still includes:
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that the contents of Brooks' Facebook account, which contained "Black nationalist and anti-Semitic" viewpoints, and his crime were exploited by white supremacists in order to push racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, claiming Brooks' attack was racially motivated, that he killed his victims specifically because he hated white people, and that left-wing media were attempting to cover up the incident. Law enforcement did not give a motive for the attack.[109][110][111]
Through the "shamelessness", to use your accurate term, is so off the charts, it may have been added by trolls seeking to discredit ADL. It certainly lowers my opinion of this anti-antisemitism organization to see it defending an antisemitic murderer, by pining of the label of "antisemite" onto his critics.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
43m ago
Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay
Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."
I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."
There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.
My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
47m ago
guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade.
This was a popular method back when ISIS was still called ISIS; some guy in France managed to kill over 100 people doing that a few years ago. It's possible to do this serially to random people in crosswalks as well; some guy in Quebec did that a while back, too.
There are ways to get large vehicles, but those are still a little harder to pull off
It's easier, trivial even, and this works in all countries. To get a large vehicle, you go to a U-Haul or your local car rental desk (which is where at least one of the vehicles used in the events described above came from, if not both). Worst case, you need a driver's license and don't have one.
Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
Probably. These people are more interested in Sending a Message (and simply picking targets of opportunity) and basically just screw around lighting rounds off in the general direction of their targets until the cops shoot them (body count rises as the cops delay); things like "raw body count" and "the suitability of one's firearm to this task" tend to be secondary considerations, to put it lightly.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
49m ago
I guess this is also one of those things that are affected by how well you can do laptop work in a moving vehicle. I can work even while riding shotgun in a car if necessary, some people can't even do it on a train. A major factor for me to not own a car; train trips can actually be useful in themselves for doing work with limited opportunities for personal distraction.
Supah_Schmendrick
57m ago
On a practical level, in a city like Seattle, a driverless taxi would become a toilet pretty quickly.
I wouldn't trust a fully-autonomous car in any location where there's a reasonable chance of any exterior disturbance in the vicinity of the car. Anything from wildlife to protesters to squeegee men - it's too easy to blockade the car (either intentionally or unintentionally) and harass the passengers.
johnfabian
1hr ago
There were a spate of these kind of terror attacks in Europe in the mid-2010s. ISIS-inspired, invariably; some 2nd generation disaffected Arab rents a U-Haul and drives it into a crowd on some holiday. The first one was the Nice truck attack in 2016; there were a bunch of copycats and as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.
There are a couple of other similar cases elsewhere; here in Toronto in 2018 an incel hired a van and killed a bunch of people with it.
Terror attacks very much seem to follow specific trends, and it seems to take certain people to think of novel ways to go about it. No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it. Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack. I'm not sure why this is, but it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
jkf
1hr ago
That seems extremely unlikely -- there are numerous mug-shots, as seen on many news sites (including one linked in this very thread).
What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?
"Wikipedia editors make up excuses to justify ideological narrative shaping on hot-CW related topics" on the other hand... would not be a big surprise to me.
some
1hr ago
This is the go-to excuse wikipedians use when they want to memoryhole something. They also used it to attempt to delete the Trump Raised Fist photo. Of course, this is just a pretext, as the solution is widely used on wikipedia: reduce the resolution of the photo.
Dont you mean the "Waukesha Christmas parade incident caused by an SUV"?
The headlines for that were beyond parody. I wonder if all the arguments are still on the wiki talk page, or stuck in an archive. There was a level of shamelessness reached in 2020-2022 that seems almost unreal now, like a fever dream.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article,
Edit history suggests that it's a licensing issue. If you can find a photo with an appropriate license you should add it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
It was already permeating normie spaces, though. Trump was part of the inflammation response to the infection of Woke ideology. Fevers are necessary; it's the infection that's the problem.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1hr ago
Or they could park further away than their occupants are willing/able to walk....
RedRegard
1hr ago
I mean that it's not indicative of whether people prefer modern life to Amish life, since the 'switch' doesn't happen without a significant cost. The fact that most people don't join Amish communes might simply signify peoples' preference for the familiar, or for environments they've already made significant investments in that they don't want to abandon.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1hr ago
I think that is kind of what they are saying - that Trump emboldened Wokeism and caused it to break free into normie spaces.
I've often dreaded the inevitable Back to the Future remake/reboot that Hollywood will jump on once the stubborn owners of the franchise die off. I just wonder how they'll manage the whole central plot line involving near-incest and a boy punching out another boy in order to protect a girl and win her heart.
Marty McFly will have to be a woman, likely black and gay/bi. Martina's equivalent-age father from the 90s being sexually aggressive towards her just isn't going to be as funny as the actual male Marty getting sexually assaulted by his equivalent-age mother from the 50s. Changing it to her mother could work for laughs and for the spectacle, but then the central plot being around getting her lesbian/bi/bi-curious mother to pair up with her father would probably not be acceptable to Hollywood.
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