Mantergeistmann
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User ID: 323
Mantergeistmann
6hr ago
Chuck Tingle is deep enough on one side of the culture war that he almost certainly is Pro-Palestine. At least he would be publicly.
Mantergeistmann
8hr ago
It seems like the original report the NYT is reporting on/linking to is from Euro Med Monitor, a group which has a squeaky clean wikipedia page and zero discussion of bias or untrustworthiness. Or, to speak plainly: there's a lot of allegations about their bias elsewhere, some as always likely overblown and some true, but it seems there's been a dedicated effort to clean up their Wikipedia page even since the last time I was there a few years ago.
For those of you curious, the Euro Med Monitor has also identified the source of the dogs: those dastardly Dutch! Who are, of course, therefore on the hook to pay up:
Lastly, the Dutch government and implicated companies must establish a dedicated compensation fund for surviving Palestinian victims affected by the use of these dogs.
Mantergeistmann
22hr ago
Never imagined I'd be posting this on a Wednesday morning
So what date/time would you have imagined?
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
Re-reading How Not to Write a Novel. Not really for the writing advice at this point, but because it's genuinely entertaining, especially the snippets of deliberately bad writing throughout.
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
I think that for the most part, civilian nuclear programs are mostly unrelated to weapons programs.
I will say that the US order of things was kind of insane: nuclear bomb -> nuclear submarine reactor -> civilian reactor.
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
They don't have to, but the US submarines do. I believe the Russians and UK do, and therefore India as well. Not sure about France and China, though.
They'd be pretty useless to Iran, though, as they don't need boomers (sonce they don't have nuclear weapons, natch), and they don't need to transit significant distances at high speed. See also: why the Baltic/Nordic powers don't bother with nuclear.
That's all pretty much a moot point, though, since Iran hasn't even pretended that they were ever going to consider a nuclear propulsion program, so they can hardly use it as a fig leaf justification for enrichment.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
I'm going to go ahead and assume that there's therefore also no reason to recommend Burroughs's Barsoom books?
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
Robert E Howard's Solomon Kane short stories?
There above the dead man's torn body, man fought with demon under the pale light of the rising moon, with all the advantages with the demon, save one. And that one was enough to overcome the others. For if abstract hate may bring into material substance a ghostly thing, may not courage, equally abstract, form a concrete weapon to combat that ghost? Kane fought with his arms and his feet and his hands, and he was aware at last that the ghost began to give back before him, and the fearful slaughter changed to screams of baffled fury. For man's only weapon is courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against such not even the legions of Hell can stand.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
If you are not trying to achieve a tactical objective, but the goal is to spread terror, then chemical weapons are probably 10x as effective per death than bombs are, and radiological weapons might be 100x as effective as plain old explosives. That Japanese cult could have achieved the same death toll of their infamous Sarin attack by throwing a few pipe bombs into a crowded subway car at a fraction of the operational complexity of synthesizing a nerve agent. But if they had done that, their attack might not even have made the top spot in international news, and would long have been forgotten outside Japan.
It's the same as dirty bombs. The radioactivity from a dirty bomb will not, realistically, cause particularly many cancer cases. It will, however, cause an absolutely absurd amount of panic, and I mean that both in the literal sense and as an intensifier.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
Credit is excellent (848 Experian; 825 VantageScore); purchase is ~10k. I looked at the AmEx Platinum since they're willing to give you an offer prior to a hard credit pull, and it was only 100k points, which barely seemed worth it. I'm leaning towards going for the CSR.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
started the first Ukraine war
Alright, I'll bite: you can criticize him for inaction concerning Crimea, but how did he start it?
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
They've been shrieking and whining for decades, far longer than it takes to acquire nuclear weapons.
I take it you don't believe in the concept of holding a breakout time or "screwdriver ready"?
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
I am pretty confident that Iran could work out a deal where (1) it turns in all its enriched Uranium; (2) it destroys all of its enrichment facilities; (3) energy grade fuel rods are shipped in from South Korea or whatever; and (4) they are carefully monitored by international observers. If Iran has no interest in a weapons program, that would be a pretty good deal.
I'd heard "however much free uranium you need to run your plants if you dismantle your enrichment facilities" was indeed an offer prior to the shooting (that was refused), but of course, it's nigh impossible to tell what anyone has actually put on the table, it seems.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
As I understand it, you can absolutely produce Tc-99m with LEU rather than HEU. Is it optimal? No. But any explanation for Iran's enrichment other than nuclear weapons requires them to be insanely unoptimal for zero reason, so at least this would be unoptimal for a good reason.
You're also introducing a weird chicken-and-egg situation. If the reason they have a sketchy nuclear program is for medicine production, which they ony need because they've been sanctioned for having a sketchy nuclear program...
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
VTIAX, maybe? AKA "rest of the world", since VTSAX is US market only? Not necessarily more returns, but the global market does sometimes outperform the US market, and that bit of diversification isn’t a bad thing.
If you don't mind EFTs instead of mutual funds, you could always go VT, which is VTSAX + VTIAX -- aka "the entire global market in one fund". Minimum effort, maximum diversification.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
Financial adjacent question, I guess: I'm expecting to make a large purchase via credit card (and pay it off immediately). If I'm not much of a traveller, how worth it are some of the fancy credit cards with massive sign-up-bonuses (and then cancel after a year to not pay the next annual fee)? I have no interest in churning, merely taking advantage of a rare large purchase.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
I'd bet AI is similar, and picking a specific single winner is improbable
Wasn't that kind of the issue with early railroads? They wound up being transformative, but a great many of the early companies and frontrunners didn't do well?
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
Which is odd, because his previous credibility with scoops has been impressive. Either one of his reputable sources is playing him, or he chose to cash in his credibility now for some reason.
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
Not hantavirus per se but biological weapons do exist, yes, along with chemical and radiological (the latter being distinct from a nuclear weapon). I believe Iraq had previously used chemical weapons during wars, at the very least.
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
Despite the inconsistency on many given reasons, the US has stayed pretty consistent on one reason, Iran was working towards nukes and we gotta stop them.
Has it? I thought it was WMDs in general, rather than specifically nukes, and specifically that they hadn't fully thought through the possibility that Iran would be more concerned with maintaining regional status/deterrence via ambiguity about their programs/stockpiles than that they'd be concerned about foreign intervention.
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
Alexander Pope's 1725 translation is excellent
"It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer."
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
this is why I believe that that the infamous "bad ending" is the canonically correct ending for Jason's story, and that the people who complain about how the game "punishes the player" for making the thematic choice by wanting to keep playing are missing the forest for the trees.
To calibrate, how did you feel about Spec Ops: The Line, and the "bad"/high chaos ending of Dishonored?
Mantergeistmann
7d ago
It's explicitly in the FBI anti-elicitation guidance, yes.
Mantergeistmann
7d ago
I wonder if that's deliberate for the purposes of paying people to rat - confusing/frightening them into thinking it's a legitimate government op.
Never mind that I'm pretty sure internal is supposed to be FBI's territory, but I doubt any of the people they were going after were the sort to be familiar with three-letter-agency jurisdictional conflicts.
Might not claim they were trained for it, but certainly claims they were used for it.
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