My God, that was you? I've had that conversation in the back of my mind for most of this decade.
Actually tried to look up "Veronica D" recently.
It's pretty close! The big problem is lethality of subsonic ammunition at long ranges, especially pistol cartridge hollow points that are designed for expansion at much closer to their starting muzzle velocity (at typical 0-25 yard handgun ranges)
If you were only going to get a few shots off, the guy probably has an 80-90% chance of surviving (single gunshot wounds are down to 13% fatal, vs 19% for multiple). And that's before all the targets start wearing low profile IIIa business suits.
Honestly it might be best to give up on the subsonic requirement outside of a very dense city, especially because the area they need to search for you scales with the range^2 xπ. A 400m shot means a .5 km^2 circle they have to search, vs .03 km^2 for a 100m shot. Pretty huge difference in the number of candidate cars and windows, giving much more time to escape the search area before they narrow it down.
Course, a 400m shot means a much better shooter with a much better rifle. At the very least a skill level that requires buying enough practice ammo to make you light up the map when they check who was in the area. Especially if you're visiting NYC from Idaho, and are already on a terrorist watchlist for asking your school board why "Dr Diddles Yeets The Teat" is in the kindergarten storytime rotation.
I'm going to say something controversial and suggest there is absolutely a niche for a short barreled folding stock rifle (legally required to identify itself as a handgun with a Disability Brace), with a (integral?) suppressor, a sub/supersonic cartridge, and a good optic for easy holdover.
Small enough to fold into a gym bag or use from a car. Far zero of around 100m for shots up to 125-150m, only halfway decent mechanical accuracy required. Maybe stick a little bipod on it for firing from a window sill or van.
It honestly wouldn't be an awful general purpose carbine either. People underestimate the importance of short, handy hearing-safe guns for home defense.
In a world where most high value targets are surrounded by drones in an environment full of shot-spotters, your choices are a) full kamikaze, b) car bomb, c) mortars, d) American Sniper 360 noscope, or E) stealthy mid-range shooting with an escape plan.
E is going to be the most practical option I should think. But if people get angry enough, option A of whipping out a giggle switch Glock and dumping the mag is going to be pretty popular too.
But maybe I'm overthinking this and most people are just gonna keep strolling up on a roof and wave to the secret service before lobbing a few rounds at the president.
SteveKirk
1d ago
I mean, it becomes a very unattractive state to any company that doesn't obey the party. If they can keep alternatives from developing, this is just another win win for them.
SteveKirk
2d ago
I'll see if I can still find them. Those particular ones were on the motte reddit I think.
SteveKirk
2d ago
Is that supposed to go straight to Cooke's Twitter profile? Not logged in ATM, so can't see if his most recent post is an exchange with you or something.
Starting to see recognition of this in fiction now. Just translated something with a few lines like
"My God, why can't you just use robots?"
The researcher gave him a puzzled look.
"Humans are much cheaper, of course."
Literally zero attempts to prosecute them of course, unlike people standing silently across the street from an abortion clinic.
(Edit: actually it looks like Florida got one in jail and fines for a few others! Clever trick, basically forcing the feds to evenly apply the FACE act against abortionist terrorists)
Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.
Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.
What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.
I mean we literally just had a discussion with someone arguing that inveterate lying was perfectly valid, after a campaign season full of the most shameless lying I've ever seen.
There are limits. I think people would appreciate an apology for the lies before extending any more charity. At least for the whole "our internal polls agreed with the prediction markets that trump was winning but we still called them insane cryptobro conspiracy theorists who did their own research (gross! Ick!)". Or "Biden's not senile you're just a rabid maga partisan for noticing." Or "the economy is amazing and Biden solved Trump's crime wave, illegal immigration isn't happening and you're imagining the price of eggs and why do you care anyway, you're weird!" All lies that were used here with no consequences for the liars other than going on some people's mental lists of sociopathic manipulators.
There's a point where you can't just get done with another round of lying and go "hey bro no hard feelings bro I was just using rhetoric to destroy your ability to understand reality and gaslight you into thinking you were insane for questioning our lies, leaving you helplessly adrift in a sea of mass propaganda to serve my own interests. Come on bro we've all done that, I do it to you all the time you can't stay mad at me! What about charity bro?! What about niceness and understanding?!"
It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic, because it's antithetical to everything this place tries to do, and it incinerates what little trust anyone has left. I want to come here to read people who will help me understand things I'm unaware of or confused about, not to get force fed this week's edition of "Blob Propaganda Magazine"
SteveKirk
5d ago
Imagining a social media intern barging into the HRW editor's office.
"Someone linked your report, sir!"
"Excellent, what conclusion did he draw from it?"
"Um..."
Well played. (I was curious because Twitter has never shown me irl hardcore porn. Don't know if there's a setting or the algorithm knows not to show it to me)
As far as I know river and coastal shopping in the US has been in decline for a long time. Particularly the great lakes: we don't move iron ore and coal (and limestone) like we used to. River shipping in the Mississippi is mostly barge these days I think.
We just don't do all the river and coastal hauling of manufactured goods like the Europeans do, not sure whether it's because we have better rail shipping or some other reason.
I do know that the US coast guard has gotten absolutely retarded about crewing requirements, at the same time as crew recruiting and training is going to pieces in the same way it is for air traffic control.
Europe on the other hand has a lot of cheap hulls and crew from eastern Europe.
SteveKirk
6d ago
That's the trick for space platforms. Asteroid chunks are awful and should either be on a totally separate system or limited somehow. An inserter that throws them overboard if there's more than X on the entire belt loop is handy (nice new feature).
SteveKirk
6d ago
That's not lying to the IRS though. They're legally your heirs, they're your children, and iirc at least in the US you can still give them $50k for their trouble and do whatever you want with the rest. Unlike France, say, where they could sue for an equal share.
SteveKirk
6d ago
Wouldn't rich people just adopt an adult, Japanese style, in order to avoid the penalty. They could pay the adoptee a small amount for their trouble and leave the rest to the Richburger Fund For Getting Skinsuited By Activists like they all do now.
Yes, and repeatedly doing so will make anyone who has more than a goldfish memory despise you as an amoral sociopathic gaslighting liar who can be trusted only to manipulate everyone around him to serve the current party line.
Credentialism + nepotism is also a major factor on the creative side. A lot of the industry jobs are going to people because "I met they/them at calarts and followed their Tumblr askblog about obese superheroines with vitiligo, that's definitely the sort of person we need for Concord's character design team." I'm not kidding, that's literally the life story of all but two people I know doing art for games and cartoons, and those two are old guys.
Same with translation/"localization." It's a tiny industry with cliques of professional bullies getting away with hiring all their discord buddies and circulating blacklists, because there's literally no oversight.
It works without pushback because there's still no counter to the superweapons they developed. HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked. And what do the old guard do except shake their heads and say "well I'd never hire or reject a candidate for political reasons."
Yeah, we used to hear that a lot from Google guys in 2012 who are no longer Google guys.
TL;DR: as nybbler likes to say, you can't pick up $20 off the sidewalk when there's a troll with a club making sure nobody touches it.
On the plus side, bugs actually get noticed and fixed now. We don't usually get deus ex style "hey we broke a bunch of maps, all the plasma weapons, and some random character interactions, have fun dealing with that for the next 25 years. Buy the sequel. Devs out"
SteveKirk
10d ago
There are a lot of weird errors and inexplicable decisions on Twitter, but I can't tell if it's gotten worse. The timeline spazzes out constantly, showing the same stuff over and over. The other day my account was limited, then suspended out of the blue, then reinstated without comment after I sent an email asking why.
Granted, the only part of that different from 2020 was actually getting unbanned, but still.
Does this place get indexed super fast by Google? The other day I searched for "Kamelanomicon" to see how many people had already made that joke, and we were the top result an hour after posting.
Are their scrapers just that regular these days? I've seen it in several cases where I've tried to look up old phrases or topics mentioned in a recent motte conversation, and that specific convo was in the top results.
And the week after I compare Snape's parentage to race-mixing, the new series makes him a half-black formerly known as Prince. Absolutely perfect.
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