The_Nybbler
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
28d ago
Do you know what women don't like? Losers.
I present you the Parable of Henry.
The_Nybbler
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8d ago
They still vote for the Democrats. And will continue to, because voting Republican (to a large and increasing extent) Just Isn't Done.
The_Nybbler
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12d ago
That's why I'd choose "bear". If I'm out in the woods I don't want to hear someone yapping away, or worse playing music through speakers or overly-loud headphones.
The_Nybbler
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15d ago
You know how I said this is all planned? This is all planned. The actual students ("useful idiots" in Cold War parlance) are just being used (with the connivance of the media) to put a sympathetic face on a movement run by well-funded professional protestors.
The_Nybbler
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26d ago
Bezos's wealth does not cause anyone to be poorer; there's no "strangling" of the bottom of the economy by the top.
The_Nybbler
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5d ago
Ok, I think we've made progress. It is literally impossible for the culture to bother taking the most basic steps to make the billions of devices on our networks not trivially hackable without causing some folks like you to shut down and stop being open to new ideas.
No, it's literally impossible to make a regulatory culture without shutting down new ideas. Perhaps there's some other way to get the result, but you can't have a culture with both properties. Once you put the commissars in place, initiative declines sharply, and that's unavoidable.
I guess we'll find out.
We've already found out in other areas. We just refuse to learn the lesson.
The_Nybbler
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6d ago
You're trying to use "rational discussion" as a cudgel to get people to accept your conclusion that a regulatory framework is a good idea and the rational thing to do is argue over the details. And you're doing it clumsily.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
6d ago
If the FAA hadn't foreclosed it all at the start by freezing the technology in place with regulations we might indeed live in a different world already. If the NHTSA existed back when the model T was current, we might need checklists for driving cars and have regulations based on needing to turn a crank to start.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
6d ago
You have zero reason for anyone to believe that the core reason why we don't have flying cars is regulatory and not technological/cultural/practical, especially when I can see with my own two eyes that every proposal that comes up is obscenely whack from a technological/cultural/practical standpoint.
Of course they're "obscenely whack". The only people foolish enough to propose them are those who know nothing about the industry and thus the fact that the regulatory barriers are insurmountable.
If you want to fly you have to learn a bevy of arcane radio procedures, log every trip you take, follow various checklists every time you fly, get your aircraft maintained only by FAA-certified mechanics, have regular medical examinations, and more. And you still only can fly in good weather, which makes every trip a risk of being stranded. There's no market for a flying car, even if technical barriers were overcome, given those requirements.
The_Nybbler
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7d ago
It can be easy and simple to follow, but incredibly grating to the personality of "artists". They don't like coloring inside the lines, even if it's easy and simple to follow.
If it's that grating, it's not easy even if it is simple. The word for such a thing is common: "tedious".
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
10d ago
But then they bulk up on grains. What we really care about is how much non-free grain we use per cow and how many people we could feed with that land and labor.
No, we don't, not really. We don't have a food shortage in the US, nor a lack of land (we have a lack of land in some spots desirable for humans to live, but there aren't many cattle in SF or NYC. Some in Newark, NJ but that's much less desirable. Nor are there cornfields there.) Worrying overmuch about those is optimizing for something that is, at this time, not much of a constraint.
Artificially-grown meat isn't free either. Sure, you eliminate the labor of some number of cowhands and slaughterhouse workers (and they won't thank you for it), but you're going to need meat factory workers, some of whom are probably more expensive labor than the cowhands and slaughterhouse workers. And all those calories which went into the cow in the form of grain to fatten it? You still need them; there's no free lunch here. Either you're still getting the energy from grain (which means you need to process the grain further, since the ruminant won't be doing it for you), or you're getting it from some other source such as natural gas.
Is this the bitter voice of experience of someone who has worked on software for the financial industry?
Not financial, but the meetings and the acronyms (though not the specific paragraph numbers) are real.
In my experience, companies that operate in compliance-heavy industries that also have hard technical challenges frequently are able to retain talented developers who hate that kind of thing, either by outsourcing to Compliance-As-A-Service companies (Stripe, Avalara, Workday, DocuSign, etc) or by paying somewhat larger amounts of money to developers who are willing to do boring line-of-business stuff (hi).
This works when the regulations target parts of the product that can be isolated from the technical challenges, but not (as in e.g. aircraft) when they can't. But I can understand the bitter envy towards software people of someone who is in a field where a good year means finding that you can tweak the radius of the trailing edge of the winglet by 1mm and save an average of a pound of fuel in an Atlantic crossing and only have to go through an abbreviated aerodynamic design review.
The_Nybbler
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16d ago
Which gets thrown into the Christians' faces whenever said Christians complain about the actions of people more pathetic than themselves. And the Christians capitulate.
The_Nybbler
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29d ago
You only need to summary execute couple of Ayatollah and decimate the revolutionary guard - the people of Iran will do the rest.
Where "the rest" is anoint a few more Ayatollahs and reconstitute the guard, and hate America even more with even better reason?
The_Nybbler
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2d ago
Eurovision is like soccer: Americans don't care, Americans don't need to care, and that's all to the good.
The_Nybbler
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22d ago
It turns out that naming the forces and pointing out their actions and advocates does not actually convince anyone. No level of evidence is sufficient for those who would rather sneer.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
9d ago
What do you mean "you can't, though"?
I mean you cannot, "right now", obtain lab grown meat of the quality you describe for any price.
I am really quite confident that I could get lab-grown meat that passed a blind test for something like tens of thousands of dollars per pound if I for whatever reason really wanted to.
I do not believe you could, and in any case you cannot do it "right now".
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
10d ago
I think you could get lab grown meat that's reasonably indistinguishable in taste from (average store bought, with implied caveats about taste and nutrition) real meat right now if you were willing to pay absurd prices.
You can't, though. And when the bills to ban real meat come around, they will be based on this false assumption, which will be trumpeted through all the normal propaganda outlets (media, schools and universities, political pressure groups with sciency names, etc).
(And further, there's better meat than the average store-bought easily available for a modest premium, often in the same stores)
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
14hr ago
It's just complaining that the game chess doesn't have a canon ending.
It does. Shah mat; the king dies.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3d ago
The guns are never, ever going to go away.
A gun buried in your backyard might as well have gone away. They may eventually do sweeps to gather up the majority of them, but even if they don't, in time you or your children will have forgotten about them.
DIY manufacturing gets easier and more accessible every year
Making guns isn't that hard, for competent machinists (of which fewer and fewer are being produced). Making ammo, on the other hand; as far as I know there's no way to even make firearm brass from non-firearm materials, never mind the chemicals. Smokeless powder requires restricted materials (nitric acid). Primers require restricted materials AND are super-dangerous to manufacture on the sly.
The gun culture has gotten more radical, but with ATF declaring firearm parts to be firearms, they'll start rolling up people soon enough, probably starting with those who post videos on the internet. This will "encourage the others" to keep their mouths shut (lest they get picked up by the feds), and the knowledge will no longer be passed along, and the culture will die.
are doing an excellent job of radicalizing the community as a whole to reject the legitimacy of gun control laws
Well, see, there's the problem. They don't. The community isn't radicalizable. At their base, they think the laws preventing me from getting a gun in New Jersey -- a requirement to be vouched for by 2 unrelated adult residents, and a requirement to produce the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health professional I've ever seen -- are reasonable restrictions if administered by decent people. They may be upset by the time it takes to get things approved or the requirement to get a new set of vouchers for every handgun or shit like that, but basically they don't believe in personal freedom or individual rights because they're not liberals (in the Lockean sense). The "second amendment" people are, but they're a small subset. Most red tribers would be fine if they could be assured they could keep their personal guns.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4d ago
The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
Certainly they are not. There have been some Supreme Court decisions, but the blue states just ignore or even defy ("Spirit of Aloha", "No Second Amendment in New York State") them. And with Rahimi the Court is poised to neuter Bruen. ATF is getting shirty (and shooty) with gun dealers again, not to mention classifying every L-shaped piece of metal a firearm. In New Jersey I still can't buy a gun or carry one if I had one. And even in Virginia, didn't they pass a bunch of new gun control?
Abbott did beat them on the border, I was wrong there. But that's a tiny light in a sea of darkness.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
5d ago
If Ford was fully liable for any accident in which a driver of a Ford vehicle was found at fault, but this did not apply to any other vehicles, how much more do you think Ford vehicles would cost than all those other vehicles to cover that liability? I expect it would be at least an order of magnitude; being involved in an accident with a Ford vehicle would be a potential lottery-winner (regardless of who was at fault, and that's often muddy). And I think that's true even if from some nonexistent objective observer's POV, the Ford driver was never actually at fault.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
6d ago
If the blue tribe needs red tribe warm bodies to fight blue tribe battles, most likely Red will just respond to calls to patriotism. But if they don't, there's always force (the draft).
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
7d ago
The difference is that it's easy to people who don't have a particular psychology or culture.
So you say. But those people can't do it, because they aren't the people building the devices. The people being required to do it are the people you (gleefully) admit it is painful for.
But hey, I think we're making progress. The reason why IoT devices have been an absolute security shitshow for years is just because a small culture of powerful technokings think that it's too boring for them to fix the obvious problems that everyone knows are obvious problems and which are objectively easy and simple to fix. We may have reached agreement!
I do not agree. The reason IoT devices have been an absolute security shitshow for years is no one except you and some European regulators actually gives a shit. There are no technokings building them, and nobody's going to pay a red cent more for an internet-connected light bulb that's more secure than some other internet-connected light bulb.
It does. Force works for everything, if you can apply enough force. Treat someone who makes a joke as if they're a violent criminal, and they will think making jokes makes you a violent criminal. Brainwashing works.
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