That number has changed because the second time they fucked with the economy, the setup was to find a really hostile planet, find an activated indium deposit, find a strong magnetic field, and set up a farm. I had one that was making me $12b a day.

I had another farm where I cooked circuit boards. Took a little longer but made like $60b a day.

Which was a much more cheese-dick way to make money than salvaging busted ships, because you used to be able to look around for ships, swap them and sell them, basically shade-tree-mechanicing your way to success.

The problem is? They crashed both of these options abruptly rather than tapering them off or whatever so you get the impression that whatever you're doing in one moment won't last until the next one. My wife stopped playing when she couldn't salvage ships any longer.

As far as Farmville goes, Surviving Mars is more fun. No Man's Sky has a real pointlessness problem.

so long and thanks for all the fish

1) PSVR2 is not backward compatible with existing PSVR titles.

2) PSVR2 is $550

3) Sony has not ported Wipeout to the PSVR2

4) NMS' endgame is still basically "farmville in space." I say that with 2-300 hours into it.

5) Every time NMS does a major upgrade it breaks everything that comes before and yeah - you can cook off a 100-hour save and come back but TWO 100-hour saves is a grind, particularly when what you get is mecha for some reason and I'd be at three.

I mean it looks cool but once you've made me sit on top of a mountain watching for cool ships to come by for six hours you've done a good job of dissuading me from doing it again. Multiply times bases, mining, freighters, you name it - it's like investing in an economy that convinces you to become an apex capitalist and then throws out their old currency every eighteen months so you can start over.

"What's that? You want to visit your base that you made three months ago? yeah sorry we redid our terrain generation so it's now in the middle of a mountain we'll let you teleport in but then you're going to be in the Upside Down and suffer massive damage every second until you die"

hahaha that's fucking awesome

Not gonna lie - I hated the shit out of Fallout. Skyrim bored me after about 4 hours. Nothing about Deathloop even vaguely interested me. I have successfully talked myself out of Ghostwire Tokyo like four times. But if it were on PS5 I'd prolly give it a go.

Those of us who are not fond of "Bethesda flavor" shall remain amused by the sobriquet "No Man's Skyrim"

So I live in Seattle, home of Starbucks. It ain't quite San Francisco but I hate 3rd wave coffee with a passion anyway so that's fine. But boy howdy can we be pretentious with our beans.

A few years back there was a guy in my CNC class. He was learning what he could before going back to Ethiopia to help out at his friend's machine shop. His family? His family had had several hundred acres around Irgachefe seized by Haile Sellasie. THAT GUY knew some coffee. I helped him out with stuff and he gave me a jar.

It was tremendous.

I had him give me the blend before he vanished; here's the breakdown for my morning brew:

1 T whole beans

1/4 star anise

1 cardamom pod

1 allspice berry

1/8 cinnamon stick (cinnamon, not that cassia shit)

Grind. Make coffee.

I generally run this blend from about... now until Easter or so.

I think it's funny that the pretentious coffee people are about "you must lovingly pourover your burr-ground third wave bullshit", most of America is at "arabica, robusta, whatever, just sprinkle it with mouthwash and call it creme de menthe" and the Ethiopians, who invented the shit, are at "coffee is 75% coffee by volume".

Honestly? You got a market for it?

There was a surprisingly large contingent of SCA folx in New Mexico. Big meets. And there was a jeweler there who made pretty much nothing but shit for SCA peeps. Most of his shit's gone?

But this is definitely cast off one of this pendants.

If you know what you can make it for, and if you know what you can sell it for, and if you can sell enough to make it worthwhile? It's a business. Something people don't realize is that a lot of the watches on this page are made in quantities of 50 max, more likely 10, most likely 1.

I highlighted what I highlighted because it brought me joy. I miss you. Honestly, earnestly and without irony. And I highlighted it because it was the first thing you've written in a very long time that had some hope and optimism to it.

For... 30 years now I have taken on the wayward children of the Internet, via PM and email, to be a Magic Mirror of advice. It took me roughly 25 years to figure out that I do it because I've never been able to tell the kid inside "it all turned out okay." I got to where I am through no guidance but my own. That's not how I'd have chosen to do it. Looking back from my unashamedly, unabashedly accomplished place in the clouds I can see how much more easily and painlessly I could have gotten through a lot of stuff if there had been someone there simply to bounce ideas off of.

Likewise, I look at you and I see a path less traveled. The anger that I'm choosing to let go of. The hopelessness I fight not to embrace. The fundamental, despairing rage. The health problems that are mine, only ten years down the road and an order of magnitude worse. There are many lives I haven't lived and yours is most definitely one of them - I was inches away from joining you on the cannery fleet, for example.

That's the sort of stuff that the internet ultimately fails at. Intense, heartfelt, non-negative emotion. That is why everyone is leaving - if we were in a room together you could watch my face, hear my voice and recognize gladness for what it is. Instead you're upbraiding me for not hating Boise enough nearly two years ago.

If the end result of all my communication with you is "the first real good belly laugh you've had in years" I am glad of that, too. It seems like you haven't been given much and if that's what you'll take from me, have it with my blessing. But please listen when I say this: my whole point, since you decided to nope out entirely, was "it's not so bad here." And I say that because thee and me looked out over the horizon, looked inward to ourselves, and made fundamentally different decisions. You chose to go, I chose to stay.

You've fought earnestly and valiantly against your environment and have triumphed. Again, this brings me unironic joy. I've fought earnestly and valiantly against my environment and have triumphed. This does not bring me joy because, as you said, tech-bro class-traitor Hollywood-boot-licker yadda yadda yadda. Rest assured nothing you can say is a tenth as colorful or relentless as my internal monologue. Yet here we sit, separated by months and thousands of miles, having a dialog.

That cabin up in the mountains a million miles from anywhere, just you and your telescope? That was the first dream I allowed myself to have. There was no part of me that wanted city streets and a knowledge of Windsor knots. That's back when 7 stoplights was too cosmopolitan by half; I grew up in a town that was 70% Mormon, with a Mormon police chief who issued a fatwah against my entire family when I was barely old enough to read because my mom was friends with "the gays." That guy? Yeah he managed to kill four of his own officers in four years in "training accidents"when I was in high school. Huh - a cop has been following me and my friends everywhere we go for five hours - must be a Saturday. One stepbrother is enough; I'd have two except the SLC police department ruled that the other one had committed suicide with a hunting rifle from across the room. The Mormon hate? I haz it. And yet steve is a hell of a nice guy and I'm supremely glad to know him. Nicest guy at my school was a Mormon, actually - probably why he died of a brain tumor at 35. Yeah, Unibomber shack with a 20" reflector and tens of thousands of dollars of SBIG was the goddamn dream. But then I met a girl who wanted to help women become mothers and then we did the math and it only pays for itself in a metropolitan area and then you make lemonade. You'll excuse me if I offer you a glass from time to time.

"Class traitor" is an interesting epithet. It was coined by the NKVD to enforce the Soviet system of state-sanctioned hierarchy and has been applied vociferously and eagerly to any foreign social strife ever since. I don't care which sociologist you care to cite, they all agree that social mobility is the cornerstone of democracy. They differ on how much the wealthy should be penalized for their mistakes and how much support the poor should be given in their advances but the only people firmly in the 'know your place' camp are the totalitarians. If you look at it, I'm the one who comes from a long line of slave-owners. My great-uncle was the chief of surgery at Montefiore, not yours. If I get my daughter into Harvard it will not be a WASP milestone but a continuation; yeah yeah foodstamps yeah yeah RIT dye but also Swarthmore and Cornell. The Soviets would welcome me back to the nomenklatura with open arms; I've learned the error of my ways and now know that the proletariat has nothing to share with the guiding lights of the Party. You? You're a peasant who refuses to work. Do you not understand your place in the system, comrade?

But we both know that's bullshit. You've finally achieved some happiness and that makes me glad. I haven't. I likely never will. The rich will never trust me because I am obviously up-jumped white trash; the poor will never trust me because I am obviously a "class traitor." So let me share what I do have:

Every person has something that costs too much. They have some item that for them, is a splurge. The economists (European economists; these are dangerous ideas in this here American Republic) even have metrics: we all own something that costs roughly 50 percent more than the thing we should have bought, and that thing is our anchor.

"I'm not truly poor, I have nice kicks." "I'm not lower-middle-class, I have a Coach wallet." "I'm upper-middle-class, I drive a BMW." "I'm wealthy, I wear a Rolex." This is why the Republicans hammer on this stuff - their job is much easier if people lack the mental fluidity to imagine other possibilities. "This is why we can't have nice things" - Feudalism as meme, right there. The poor aren't truly poor if they have flat screen TVs and air conditioning, I saw it on Tucker Carlson. What made you upper-class in '80s Moscow? A washing machine.

So making nice things that the people with student loan payments and a 10-year-old car who struggle with their childcare expenses can afford? Yer goddamn right. That's me being a class traitor. Kinda like the duel I'm having with the city council right now - their new building code was crafted so vociferously to ban "methadone clinics" that they ended up banning "clinics." Me? I a third of my patients are Medicaid. I can absolutely make money off poor people by providing them healthcare. It's my flavor of capitalism - lemonade flavor.

__________________________

I highlighted what I highlighted because I have nothing to add to your monolog. I have nothing to argue with. You could write that last sentence on your tombstone and it'd be a happy ending. We've been trading notes for ten years or more now and I didn't think you'd make it this far. Neither did you. Your day-to-day is very different from mine and no lie - I'm envious. A big part of me would be very happy dealing with your bullshit, rather than mine. But lemme share a story:

I used to do airport noise mitigation. 'round here that meant coming into your apartment, setting up microphones, and sitting there in the silence until I'd counted a requisite number of planes. So there I am, sitting in someone eles's space, and that space is extremely airport-adjacent.

There were nice apartments - lemons from lemonade. There were ghastly apartments - one dude just had pee pads scattered all over the floor and had clearly let his dog go wherever for weeks to make the space "welcoming" for us (never mind that he volunteered). One really stuck with me though. Living room was empty except for a big screen TV, a barcalounger, a horse trough full of canned chili and a horse trough full of empty chili cans. Oh, and a TV tray with a fork on it. And I could hear the siren song of its simplicity. Still can.

I think every dude struggles not to "feed that wolf." I think it takes a lot more fortitude to turn your back on the world and dare nature not to kill you. I think it is an inspiring act of courage to refuse your lot and survive, to make a better life out of nothing, to ultimately reject that thing that gets most of us out of bed in the morning and to do it in a way that isn't two troughs of chili and a flat screen.

So you'll forgive me if I occasionally put on your shoes and second-guess your choices. Would I be as full of outrage, as condemning of everyone I meet, as seethingly spiteful of earnest, heartfelt congratulations?

I fight it every moment, mutherfucker.

So from one cranky old man to another, I'm glad you got a belly laugh. You need more of them. And I'm glad I still get under your skin. It means you're still listening. And I'm glad you're not dead.

Keep it up.

I could speak at length about design language. The watch I wear has been made by five different companies at three price points over the past 70 years.

The motion of the Automate Fee Ondine was done by Pierre Junod, who is a master badass.

The other acknowledged master of automata is a friend of mine. She taught me guilloche.

I have another friend who made most of his money as a "paper engineer" - as in, he designed pop-up books. It was this connection that got him hooked up with Brian Selznick when Brian was busy trying to help the Franklin Institute restore The Maillardet. As a result Andy got to spend two weekends getting the thing presentable for the bicentennial... and ended up being the model for Hugo's dad.

That's what I'm saying. Her ring is practical AF but her corner-case is so corner-cased that it's impractical for her.

So here's a red pill for you. Pretty much everything you've ever seen, aside from computers and game consoles, is costed at "what did it cost us to make it, parts and labor" times roughly 40 percent, and sold at "what did it cost us to buy it" times roughly 40 percent. At least, that's the model - that way you can knock up to 25 percent off for sales and you make a little money. And that's why you rarely see discounts below that on anything that isn't going to literally or figuratively spoil - until the inventory is written down to nothing, it's a wash at 40 percent.

An iPhone 14 Pro Max costs Apple about $460, for example. They will sell it to you for $1099. $464 x 1.4 = $650 cost; for the factory $650 cost x 1.4 = $908 for the Apple Store (or whoever). Remember, Apple was the company that said "phones aren't loss leaders for carriers" because up until the iPhone, phones were literally sold at below cost to get you to sign up for AT&T or whatever. And this is the segment with the most intensive competition in the world, using the hottest components, with the most brutal marketing from the biggest companies in the world. And even there, the 40 percent rule holds.

So. Apple makes almost all their shit in house. Nearly zero watchmakers do. We buy our hands from here, get these guys to make our dials, get these other guys to make our bands, who get these guys to make their buckles, etc etc etc. Most watchmakers are assemblers, nothing more. And uhh.

Got a buddy. Buys his cases for $2000, buys his movements for $2000, buys his bands for $100, spends 32 hours on a rose engine to make the dial, sells 'em for $28,000. $28,000/1.4 = $20,000 - 4100 = $15,900 / 32 = damn near $500 an hour making that dial. Not a bad rate, eh? Except he pays someone else so his cost is probably $350/hr which roughly half goes to the employee (taxes and stuff are crazy) is still $175 an hour to sit there doing the ergonomically worst job in the world for a week. Dude's probably taking home about $4500 a week.

Except he's not. 'cuz that guy? He's a bunch of high school students. Myeah. My buddy is making HELLA more than 40% profit. Know what? he wears his own watches. Compare and contrast: Max Busser did an instagram spread of all the Horological Machines once. Someone asked "yours?" and he responded with "what do you think I'm made out of money?"

Aston Martin went public in 2018 and published their profits. It worked out to about $72 a car. Now on the one hand, there's a lot of shady accounting. But on the other hand, you wouldn't expect to see it in a "buy our stock we're profitable" prospectus. Automotive profits are pretty well-understood; the car industry is large and transparent. Jewelry is not. Did you know that Rolex, much like the NFL, is a non-profit? Look at all the money they hide I mean all the altruism they do!

By "normie" I mean "people who don't stick their fingers up vaginas for money." As in, "even jewelry worn by normies is often impractical." "normie" has nothing to do with people buying watches off the GHPG list and you know it.

"I've seen like 1 Louis Vuitton handbag" makes "I guess I just don't get invited anywhere cool like that" self-evident. I wear a Frederique Constant I bought drunk off eBay for $140 but I have friends that make hundred thousand dollar watches.

Said-same friends do not wear hundred thousand dollar watches.

But then, I do have a friend whose watch collection is in the millions.

he does not make watches.

So there's a tension between utility and aesthetics with jewelry. My wife, for example, has to take her wedding ring off at work a lot because her hands go... sensitive places, shall we say but even in normie-land, crazy-stupid rings aren't uncommon. See also: earrings, bracelets, whatever.

This is especially problematic for accessories with nominal utility - belt buckles, pens and in particular, watches.

It's not uncommon to make cuff links out of lady's watch movements. It's highly uncommon to actually make them tell time. Cartier put a clock on a pen (I opted not to buy the straight line engine that made that pen) but it looks fucking stupid. The real problem is that the luxury industry is so completely compartmentalized that there's no real synthesis going on anywhere... and the places that do all their own stuff are invariably watchmakers, invariably male, and invariably fine purveyors of what I call womanbane.

There's a real love of mechanics for mechanics' sake and any attempt to make that oh, feminine or, you know, not fuggly is generally not attempted by anyone without a Y chromosome. Thus does the whole industry arc further and further away from the aesthetic sense of half the population. This is best illustrated by Richard Mille - the company has been run by the daughters of the founders for about four years now and yet the closest they can get to "aesthetically pleasing from a normie standpoint" is "how about pink." You have to keep in mind that for rank and file jewelers, "hinges" is a dark art...

...so you think they'd be blown away by shit like this but instead they hate on it and scream "kill the witch."

So the Piaget is a sautoir. There are certain styles of jewelry that the haute joaillerie world tries to make happen every five years yet the normies refuse to wear:

- Tiaras. It bums the jewelers out that they can't sell crowns anymore. I get it. There's a lot of room to design with a tiara. However, when you design modern tiaras to look like Edwardian tiaras you're kinda stuck. I don't know why nobody can go "cool thing that goes in your hair for occasions other than being married to Prince Charles" but they can't.

- Brooches. "Stop wearing pretty patterns, put on this large fashionable chunk of expensive metal and gemstones." I would say brooches are 4-5x overrepresented in most jewelers' repertoires, compared to how much they get worn. Jewelers would like us all to go to more formal balls. The existence of corsages demonstrates that we have that instinct for brooches, we just don't really have the society.

- Chatelaines. If you want to see a jewelry historian swoon, make a chatelaine. "Remember when a keychain cost more than the house it opened?" Cartier remembers.

Is it a trend? No, not really. It's sort of a modification of the classic "nurse's watch" which was hung upside down from your lapel so that you kept it out of the muck you worked with all day but when you needed to know the time, you could touch the back and flip it up at your face. But also kind of a sautoir. I dunno, Piaget to me has always been an off-brand Cartier.

(speaking of - for ppl who own multiple watches for different outfits, how do you keep them all running? that's gotta be a bit of a chore)

That's a whole thing for automatics. Here's my favorite. There's also a raging discussion about whether it's better to leave them unwound or wind them occasionally or keep them wound etc etc etc. Thing is once you get there you're talking about ornamental objects that tell time only incidentally so it doesn't really matter. The question does end up less philosophical the more crazily complicated the watch, however. I mean for that VC&A maybe you pay somebody I don't know because correcting it so Jupiter is in the right place is no easy task.

That Bethune is probably the most normal-looking watch they've ever made. They're known for weirder.

Someone else has done that, I just can't recall who. Not Cartier, not Chanel, not Harry Winston, not VC&A, but someone has a whole line of "here are enameled flower petals with a watch face in the middle" and they don't look like teeth. It's gonna bug me all day 'cuz you're right, that thing is unsettling.

(1) because you know they would boil them

(2) Requiring a whole 'nuther contraption and method in one of the most streamlined and simplified galley profiles in the history of food

(3) to go on a bun completely different from any other served by McDonald's

(4) That takes 3 or 4 times as long to separate as a hamburger bun

(5) and then doesn't sit politely in place while you condiment it with a caulking gun

(6) and is served traditionally in a tray, rather than a wrapper, thereby completely fucking up drive through, which is 70% of their sales

(7) only to provide a product that consumers expect to cost 70-80% of the price of a burger

(8) which is still on the dollar menu

(9) while Costco loses their shirts selling them for $1.50

I know that was a flippant question? But McDonald's is anything but flippant.

Perhaps one reason I bonded so well with the Pacific Northwest is it also seems to hate hot dogs. The late-night Seattle dog is a kielbasa served with cream cheese and grilled onions, and the "mariner dog" is a double-smoked Hempler's sausage. They have a lot more in common with a hot link than they do with a hot dog.

Honestly?

I did the July one because nobody would listen to the fact that I'm actually doing stuff, and it was cathartic to catalog all the shit that I had gotten done. I did the August one because I recognize the value of that catharsis.

I am on that voyage where your home shores are long gone, your destination remains over the horizon, and you find yourself surrounded by people with no understanding how sailing works but a bottomless curiosity for "are we there yet."

Honestly? It fucking sucks. It sucks on every possible level.

When I built the car I found myself going "huh. I wonder how to make a distributor because this engine is actually a Mercruiser and they don't make a marine HEI." I had to cobble something together from junk yard parts. I went to Checker and said "I need a GM alternator" and they would say "for what car" and I would say "doesn't matter, give me a hundred amp" and they would say "it doesn't work that way son" and I would say "that one on the shelf there will do" and they would smile and go "no, fucker, tell me what car it is" and I would have to go "A four wheel drive Triumph TR-7 on a scout chassis with a full roller 400 SELL ME A FUCKING ALTERNATOR ASS" but of course I didn't do that because I was a seventeen year old kid with exercise bulimia and a disabling crush on a girl who didn't know I existed. So getting a damn alternator was obviously something that scarred me for life.

I'm now at "yeah nobody remembers the specs for that spindle" and "nobody really remembers how resolvers work" and "yeah you may have paid us $6k but we just hooked up the existing wires it's not like we tested anything" and "we'd love to answer your question but we'd much prefer to do the integration for you it will probably be only $30k now that you've done all the work."

Here's what the hobby machinist crew thinks is a "tool change."

Here's what Kern thinks is a "tool change."

Now - who's got two thumbs and absolutely no support from anyone on closing the gap?

this guy

So "drag knife" is not the correct term. The correct term is "tangential knife".

This is only relevant because it is how engraving works.

"Engraving" in watchmaking is a barely-automated process called "engine turning" everywhere but the US, where "engine turning" means something else entirely because of course it does. The first lathes in europe were actually for "ornamental turning" and it was very much the sport of kings.

When applied to jewelry, this is called guilloche, a made-up word much like "karaoke" or "boba" that is foreign but with an extremely muddy etymology. So muddy in fact that half the world (and it is an exceedingly small portion of the world) says "gee-oh-shay" and the other half says "gwee-osh."

Guilloche sucks. I've done about 30 hours training on it. I hate it.

Note that I also hate the wire-bendiness of cloisonne, but love the paint-by-numbers of it. Solution? mechanize that shit.

This is a Bumotec S191V. It's yours for a mere $750k.

But it can be tricked into doing mayhem.

And, for roughly $25k out the door, so will the FrankenKern.

(fingers crossed)

It's called gun drilling and about all I know about it is what the rep at IMTS told me when I looked up and saw a 3/8ths drill bit whose business end was eight feet above me. The "gun drilling pavilion" was not huge? But it was not small either. I'll bet you can do a 1mm hole 40mm deep (I've been doing enough metric that I'm starting to think in it!) but not without planning and tooling up. Now I'm really curious as to what that hole was for... I learned engineering fundamentals by taking apart cars from the age of 6 so underneath all the theory is a Cargo Cult understanding of mechanical objects. "I have never seen that hole, therefore it is impossible" without ever learning any 10x rules.

I've harped on this before - we see 3d through the way things move as we move our head, not through stereoscopic vision. Stereoscopic vision really only carries out to things about 6 feet away. When we're looking at a monitor, the image doesn't move - but with my magic puck I can move things around exactly as I want them whenever I want them and my brain builds 3d. Usually you hold down the center button but I found that limiting, so I bought a puck. Jeron Lanier made the point that humans adapt to any control schema really quickly; for my brain, "twitch my fingers" easily substitutes for "move my head."

This is all for jewelry making, but those jewels will run towards watches, pens and accessories. At a certain point, any precision assembly or surface needs to be machined rather than filed or cast or sawed or whatever. I got to the point with the casting where I went "and nothing will go together without things being precision drilled" at which point the question became "so how are you going to do that."

This machine cost me about $9k for the husk. It's been about another $15k for parts (fully $7k of that was rebuilding the spindle - yeowtch!). It will, if things go to plan, perform about as well as this thing, which I was quoted $180k for. It will also have a working envelope easily 3x as big in every direction. And, because I am controlling it with a highly-configurable Windows-based CNC interpreter, I will be able to do obnoxious things like configure it as a 5-axis drag knife, which is a device that no one in the world has ever made.

Let's take a step back:

The only criticism I leveled above is the notion that RFK's statements, in that clip you linked, are anything other than pseudoscientific dezinformatsiya straight from the Kremlin. I leveled this criticism on the idea that ethnically-targeted bio-weapons are nonsense. And I say this personally knowing people whose entire job it was to evaluate hostile foreign bio-weapons for USAMRIID.

All the rest of your tag cloud here is about other stuff. It is answers to questions I didn't raise. it is attitudes about subjects I haven't brought up.

I will say this: it is my measured and informed opinion that RFK Jr is the very definition of a useful idiot.. And I will say this: RFK Jr. does not share your ideals. The Kennedys are a transactional family, none more transactional than RFK Jr. He spent what, 15 years as in environmental law? Why isn't he running on the environment? Think about it for a minute. How hard would GenZ lean into a candidate who said "I am a single-issue candidate and my issue is climate change"? But that's not where he's getting his attention from. Because it's not the attention he wants.

Biden will absolutely debate. He will debate any opponents, Republican or otherwise, under the terms of debate agreed upon by the opposing parties. You know that, I don't need to remind you. It's 2023, man. We're a long, long road from there. And you're giving to RFK Jr. to, I dunno, somehow alter history? Show me the debates here.

Biden has not done a lot of press conferences. He's also been dealing with States of the Union where this is the standard level of decorum:

All that to say, "I don't like biden because he doesn't do a lot of press conferences" is telegraphing pretty loud that you don't like Biden for _________________________ (whatever reason is convenient in the moment). I'm not going to tell you to like Biden.

But I am going to tell you that you're too clever to take on RFK Jr's baggage just because you think Biden is old.

"The Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and WE are developing ethnic bioweapons that's what all those labs in Ukraine are about, they're collecting Russian DNA, they're collecting Chinese DNA so that we can target whole people by race."

Dude.

"there is an argument that COVID-19 is ethnically targeted" is bad enough what he's got there is full-blown precious bodily fluids nonsense.

See here's the thing. You're surrounded by smart people. You're an officer at a biomedical startup FFS. You're married to a doctor. You have, at arm's reach, a gobsmacking amount of medical expertise. Instead you are championing a guy parroting Putin's talking points.

He pretty clearly says that he doesn’t know if it’s deliberate.

No he pretty clearly exaggerates a bunch of nonsense that not even RT was willing to fully commit to.

I’d be shocked if nation states weren't developing targeted bioweapons.

'k dude you know what a "targeted" disease is? SIckle-cell anemia. 93% of patients who suffer from sickle-cell disease are African American. Why? Sickle-cell trait is prophylactic against malaria. And yet. 7 percent of patients with sickle-cell disease are not African-American. bioweapons are tactically (and, frankly, strategically) useless to begin with; an "ethnic bioweapon" that affects 7% of people who aren't your targeted ethnicity is Hugo Drax nonsense.

Know who COVID targets? Poor people. And not very accurately, I might add. First hiccup in my life from COVID (other than catching it) was a movie I was doing post on got pushed because one of the millionaire producers up and died within 3 days of symptoms.

You're smarter than this.

My gut reaction is to say "with Eva Saxl" not because I think this line of questioning should be humored, but because Eva Saxl is the best example of sino-hebraic badassery I can think of.

I disagree.

My considered observation is that the Biden administration has kept the plates spinning for long enough that when they come crashing down, he can say "this wouldn't be happening if the Republicans let me have my way a year ago" with facts, soundbites and graphs to back him up.

From a campaign standpoint, the Democrats need the business community to be lethargic. They traditionally back Republicans and being able to go "you've operated for four years under near -'70s business conditions and you're doing great" is likely to keep the wallets closed of all but the toothiest idealists. Ukraine? They've broken through the Russian defensive lines at Robotyne. They've established a beachhead on the left bank of the Dnipro They just shut down civil aviation in Russia for several hours with cardboard. And the CIA? VDV in Kyiv was Gabriel blowing his trumpet to them; this is the ratfucking they've trained for for eighty fucking years. The 2024 election is going to be very, very different from the 2020 election from the 2016 election.

Kamala Harris is "unlikeable" the same way Flava Flav is unserious. It's the VP's job to be the foil for the opposing party. Look at Dan Quayle. Look at Dick Cheney. Mike Pence was brought on to make it appear as if Trump had someone other than Steve Bannon to ask questions of; we saw how well that went but fundamentally, the job of the VP is to be the un-president. That's how she ran for the job - attacking Biden during the primaries and appearing adversarial was the whole of the gig. Biden had already promised massive concessions to the SCLC in order to gain their endorsement; Kamala Harris was gonna get the gig no matter what.

It's funny that you're putting Michelle Obama as somehow more electable than Kamala Harris, despite the fact that republicans ceaselessly referred to her as an ape.

Speaking as someone who voted for Clinton? Clinton is the Nixon of the left. She's eminently qualified. She's well-connected. But she's never cultivated trustworthiness or an open appeal to her enemies.

Hilary Clinton has never had much use for people who disagree with her, and she's never felt much need to explain herself to people who don't already get it. Her politics and mine mostly align (mostly) but I'd read the fine print on anything she did because she's a fine print kinda girl.

I think Hilary Clinton is a gifted political operative, but gifted political operatives aren't necessarily electable. They can't be much of the time. Consider how much the Left hates Kissinger, and then consider just how big of a hand-shaped welt Kissinger has left on the ass of history - that dude knew he could accomplish more by not being accountable to voters so he never ran for any elected office.

Hilary won a Senate seat so obviously she's no Kissinger. But I think she's got a little too much Nixon for this political era.

The thing about Biden is he inherited a tabula rasa federal government; the Trump administration cleaned house so thoroughly, on purpose and by accident, that the quiet coersion of conventional government has been borderline revolutionary behind the scenes. My perspective is that Biden is exactly the distraction the Republicans need to keep them from drawing attention to the massive economic and judicial reforms the Democrats are sneaking in during the dead of night.

Government should be boring. Biden is boring. I'm ready to be bored, global warming notwithstanding.

I interviewed Henry Lai for an hour once. I needed information for a screenplay on how, exactly, one would communicate with the brain via non-invasive methods. He was, at the time, the guy to talk to about cell phone radiation. Might still be, I dunno; it was 20-odd years ago.

And 20-odd years ago, it was an uncontested fact that radiation had an impact on the brain. What kind of impact? Inconclusive. Dude brought up a dozen studies for me, some saying it made you stupider, some saying it made you smarter. Some saying it caused headaches, some saying it cured them. Lai's spitball take was that heating up a muscle increases blood flow, heating up the brain increases blood flow, increased blood flow is a catalyst, not a reactant.

Here's some science.

Cell phone radiation is advertised as SAR - Specific Absorption Rate. That's a "how bright is your lightbulb" measurement; the amount of light/heat that falls on your body is a function of how far away you are. In the US, a cell phone must put out no more power than 1.6W/kg - as in, holding the phone up to your head, the whole of your brain, all 1300g of it, can absorb no more than 2W.

On the other hand, your wifi router puts out about 100mW. It, of course, is subject to spherical decay and the inverse square law. Most emission is given in terms of 1w/1m and then given in dB; any given conventional loudspeaker will lose 6dB per doubling of distance. So a 120dB Marshall stack from 3 feet away? is 114dB at 6 feet, 108dB at 12 feet, etc. 3dB is a doubling of power; a 6dB loss reflects a power level 25% as strong. Of your 500W Marshall stack, 125W is there at 6 feet, 31W is there at 12 feet, 8W is there at 24 feet, etc.

I am currently six feet from a Unifi hot-spot. It's prosumer/B2B shit; it puts out 200mW. Sitting here typing I am receiving 0.05 watts off it. Should my phone ring? And I hold it up to my head? I will be receiving about 1.5W.

This is just algebra. It doesn't require much in the way of specialist knowledge; a little googling goes a long way. Now, you tell me - does RFK have a cell phone?