I'm trying to compile some beach reads for when that time comes, but also just plugging along. I've started two of these (Living Hell and Salvation), the rest are on deck. Nonfiction - Living Hell. Seeks to de-glorify the Civil War by showing how horrible it was for all involved. - Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. This was recommended by my new academic advisor as a good general history of the period. Fiction - The Algebraist by Iain Banks - Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
I'm here, but mostly lurking like once a week. I've found a discord server that I hang out on more regularly; I like the real-time nature, don't like the chat page here (for technical/logistical reasons, not personal), and don't really care about politics these days. I'm also trying to make peace with just plain not being that interesting, something that real-time chat is more compatible with than commenting on specific stories.
The ACA was a compromise that didn't need to be made - the Democrats had complete control of the government for two years and squandered it. The Paris Accord was symbolic, and hasn't led to any meaningful action. I think giving them credit for influencing Obergefell is a stretch. Meanwhile, you have significant problems that continue: racial injustice in the legal system, police brutality, climate change, and immigration, about which they did nothing or even set us back. Let us also not forget that they set the precedent of saying it's totally fine to execute American citizens abroad without due process (to say nothing of all the foreign civilians they killed via the drone program).
It's an interesting question, but IMO is more a matter of his version of strict textualism than any underlying policy motives.
I might well be able to do that, so definitely keep us updated!
Wiretap law is debatable, tort doesn't seem likely (not sure what kleinbl00 is referring to with that one). The thing is, for court to happen, the landlord has to get caught. Also, this presupposes they don't require consent as part of the lease, which muddies the waters still further. edited to add: this also assumes the tenant has the money to sue over it.
This was what jumped out at me as well. If someone new joins, and no one is following them, how exactly will that first follow happen? Moreover, I for one don't really want to have to go through all that curation, especially at first. We don't really have a problem with unwanted users showing up, so I'm unclear on what exactly this is meant to solve.
By believing what I believe? So you're suggesting I should ignore my own principals in order to get a participation trophy? Meanwhile, when was the last time a center-right Dem actually won a national election?You have already abdicated your role in this election...
Not without massively restructuring our economic and political systems, no. Where's Leto II when you need him?Can we win the tug of war against short-termism?
I don't think the election will be canceled for two reasons, or maybe two and a half. First, I don't think Trump's ego will allow for him to plan for something like this. He is literally incapable of imagining a scenario in which he's not beloved by everyone, so the idea that he could actually be voted out is just not something he can comprehend very well. This makes planning for such an event difficult. Second, assuming I'm wrong about this (or that Trump is manipulated into affecting the election), it's too overt. It would cause significant unrest, even more than we've already seen. Even if Trump's supporters among the powerful don't actually care, it's still messy and would hurt their bottom lines. Especially when there's an alternative: create just enough in terms of impediments to voting and the like that the election still happens, Trump wins, but there's nothing overtly illegitimate about the process. If it takes more than a single sentence to explain why the election is illegitimate, you've lost the argument. Meanwhile, Biden will concede "for the good of the country," and there we go. It's rocky, but Trump gets what he wants, and without even more civil unrest (read: economic harm). The third / second-and-a-half thing is that, like uhsguy says, there's not the support among people who could actually pull this kind of thing off subtlety. Trump has his acting DHS secretary, but I question whether enough people within the DHS and other three-letter agencies would actually be willing to go along with this for it to work. At that point he'd have to do something incredibly overt, which brings us back to my first two objections, only worse, because he'd have significant parts of the defense/intelligence establishment openly opposing him.
I think people misunderstand his ideology - it's not conservative the way Alito and Thomas are conservative. He's much more of an old-school conservative: generally hands-off when it comes to government action, which can be good (civil liberties) and not good (regulation). But IMO anyone surprised by this hasn't been paying a ton of attention. Gorsuch wrote a dissenting opinion when he was a circuit judge saying that he didn't think police should be able to apply the "plain sight" doctrine after they knocked on a guy's door despite a "no trespassing" sign on the property line.
Nope. We're not especially social anyway, and I think it's premature.
In addition to what kleinbl00 said (which I largely agree with), there's another factor: there's no actual way to gauge success. One, we don't actually have an agreed-upon best-case scenario. But the other thing is that, no matter what, we're going to be looking at what we did versus a whole bunch of counter-factuals. There'll be retrospectives, think pieces, and analyses from hell to breakfast when this thing is over, but I expect it'll be some time before we can really make any reasonable conclusions about all this. I think what we're seeing is just how dependent our society is on certainty, and how poorly we handle a situation that doesn't allow for it. I posted a quote about six months ago suggesting this, and while it was shared, the only comments I got were uniformly critical. We've decided that wild speculation and complete guesses are better than someone saying "I don't know." A terrible plan is apparently better than no plan. The scientific community can't fully agree on a lot of this stuff, but "we're doing what we believe to be the best thing based on what we know right now" is not a good talking point. Plus, when the scientific consensus shifts (which it's supposed to do), this hurts the credibility of scientists in many people's minds, which is the opposite of what it should be doing. We'll never get the whole picture, so the best we can hope for is little bits of clarity here and there. But instead, because of the ideological baggage we've brought to bear, we're either left having to defend a seemingly-contradictory view (rather than just an updated one) or we take the change as proof that the source of this information was never credible to begin with, which we knew all along.
Numbers are just, like, ideas, man.
My wife brought some home from the grocery store a couple days ago. I never understood the idea of calling food "sinful" before then.
I started with a textbook, Rodney Decker's Reading Koine Greek. I'd studied Classical Greek for a couple years in college, so thankfully a lot of it was a refresher (plus beginning to familiarize myself with differences in Koine vs. the older dialect I'd learned). After that, I'm just reading!
I like the idea of micropayments, but haven't seen enough about their approach yet. The rest aren't really a selling point for me: the Tor browser bundle is fine (and uses Firefox), and I don't like the monopoly that Chromium-based engines have.
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. It showed me a new, different way to approach the world, God, and the interactions between the two. Dune. It taught me about political manipulation, sure, but more importantly, that we can be more than the sum of our parts. That we can teach ourselves to be more.
If you're comfortable with Linux, is that + Wine not an option? I've seen where people have gotten the Adobe Creative Suite working in Wine, but I dunno about AutoCAD. I only use Windows for gaming (literally nothing else), so can't help on the quality of life stuff.
From watching this video and reading a few Slate Star Codex posts on "enlightenment" and the like, it definitely seems like this is a case of "there's something there but it's much more nuanced than people think." Also, as someone with ADHD, I want to do violence whenever someone tells me I should "stay in the moment."
Certainly the most underrated president of the modern era, if not in U.S. history. The crisis of confidence speech remains prophetic both in terms of what he said and how much its reception says about us.
I have made 0 progress on Yo el supremo, as I don't really have a good time during my daily routine to read something that requires that level of concentration. If I do, I'm probably reading Greek. But I am reading A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli, and holy shit is it good. Imagine that Chuck Palahniuk was born in a shack on some Mississippi swamp with no running water, and this is what he would've written when he grew up. It's true Southern Gothic: it's never clear just how much of the seemingly-supernatural stuff we're supposed to take seriously, and the characters really don't distinguish between what's "natural" and what isn't.
Saw a story from the NYT this morning while in Starbucks (paper newspapers ftw) saying that jailers had violated procedures in how Epstein was housed. He was supposed to have another inmate with him, but didn't, and guards were supposed to check on him every 30 minutes, but didn't.
That is amazing, both because of how silly it is and how non-trivial it must have been to pull off. On a related note, behold the FLOPPOTRON:
So you think what he campaigned on is more important than what he actually does?
Pretty much. "Conspiracy" in the legal sense requires there to be an underlying crime; you can't conspire to do something that isn't illegal. The report then goes on to say why Mueller wasn't confident that they could prove all the elements of the underlying foreign-interference crime, and your summary of that is basically right as well. The statute in question requires a "knowing and willful" violation, meaning those involved would've had to have known that it was illegal. Not just that, of course, but prosecutors would have to prove that they knew, and that's pretty difficult.Apparently you have to prove intent to commit a crime in a conspiracy(?) charge and the Trump tower meeting with Don Jr is incredibly suspicious but he's too dumb to prove he was malicious. I don't know. That's me recalling an NPR story I probably wasn't even paying attention to
I can't reply to kleinbl00 directly, but I'd just like to chime in and say that he seems to have read a different article from me. On the one hand, he tells us that Buzzfeed "managed to find only four crimes across twenty years." Except a tiny way in we're told: We apparently have a different definition of "crime." (edit to fix typo) Villagers have been whipped with belts, attacked with machetes, beaten unconscious with bamboo sticks, sexually assaulted, shot, and murdered by WWF-supported anti-poaching units, according to reports and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The charity’s field staff in Asia and Africa have organised anti-poaching missions with notoriously vicious shock troops, and signed off on a proposal to kill trespassers penned by a park director who presided over the killings of dozens of people.
WWF has provided paramilitary forces with salaries, training, and supplies — including knives, night vision binoculars, riot gear, and batons — and funded raids on villages. In one African country, it embroiled itself in a botched arms deal to buy assault rifles from a brutal army that has paraded the streets with the severed heads of alleged “criminals.”
The charity has operated like a global spymaster, organizing, financing, and running dangerous and secretive networks of informants motivated by “fear” and “revenge,” including within indigenous communities, to provide park officials with intelligence — all while publicly denying working with informants.
ACO is really quite amazing, and I've been hoping to see someone like her for a long time. I just worry some scandal will be manufactured shortly. I hope she's kept her nose extremely clean for all of our sakes.
Super cold here in central VA, made worse by the fact that it rained yesterday, which is the perfect recipe for black ice. Plus I saw this morning that our state Dept of Transportation wasn't able to get out and treat the roads for some reason. More generally, I'm in a better place about actually doing some things I've been talking to myself about doing forever. Drawing is happening more, and I'm planning out what I hope will be a decent story. (Serious plug for Dan Harmon's Story Circle technique). Keeping work productivity going is hard, because I'm getting into Peter Gibbons territory ("It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care."). In today's edition of first world problems, the laptop I bought when I went into private practice may be nearing the end of its lifespan. It'll hit 5 years old next month, and while it seems to be doing okay, I'm not sure how much longer that'll last. At the least, I need to redo the partitions on it. It has a small SSD and then a large platter drive, and without thinking I put / on the SSD. This means my home partition has way more space than it needs, while I'm having to clean stuff off to even be able to do system upgrades. For some reason pacman is super squirrelly about allowing an alternate install location. Speaking of squirrels, it also hordes downloads like it's the apocalypse: it saves everything it downloads by default, which means you end up with lots of old versions just hanging out (the idea is to be able to downgrade as needed, but (1) I've never needed to, and (2) it's far too aggressive). I just ran a script to clear pacman's cache on my desktop, and it erased 14.2GB of old packages. Dell has some nice-looking 2-in-1 laptops right now, which even has their version of the Apple Pencil. Apparently Linux compatibility is pretty good with all of those, but I'll need to research that further. It'd be nice to have something that could replace both my laptop and my iPad, but I don't know if there's anything for Linux that's as good as Notability.
Got passed over for promotion at work, which is kind of a bummer but only kinda. I can't say they made a bad choice (the one they picked has been here longer and is good). My main frustration is that she was more productive on our day-to-day stuff, but I did more side project type things...I'd hoped those would matter more (but am not surprised that it didn't, admittedly). I'm also not super invested in my job, and am still kinda hoping I can find something else. But then I remember that it's highly unlikely that I'll find something that'll pay this well for demanding so little. So I just need to figure out what else to do with my time. (I did see a posting about one job that looked interesting, but the only available locations were not anywhere we wanted to live.) Today's the last workday before a four-day weekend, which is not doing wonders for motivation or productivity. Speaking of which, writing and arting seem to be most of it, at least when I'm stuck in an office (outside of which my spawn, kung fu, and gaming still reign). I hate doing creative things a lot more than I used to, largely thanks to figuring out ways to give myself permission to suck. Random aside: my daughter has an inflatable horse that she's started sleeping with. Last night, she decided that he needed to wear a pull-up like her. She was very proud of this. (Four-year-old logic is frequently amazing.) About the only other thing on the horizon is a trip to New York next month for Chinese New Year, which I'll be doing with some of the broader kung fu organization. A celebratory gathering of some kind is part of it, and hopefully I'll be able to get in some extra training. (I'm also hoping it isn't too expensive, but with kung fu stuff you never know.)